Abstract

Booksellers’ Price Fixing Policies from the 15th to the 17th Century

The invention of bookprinting was soon followed by important innovations in the field of booksellers’ sales and price policies, long before these policies became common in the wake of the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century. The author deals mainly with price fixing policies. He shows that under certain circumstances price fixing occured quite frequently from the end of the 15th until the middle of the 16th century in Italy, France and Germany. When in the 18th century in other sectors of the economy price fixing policies started or were about to be started, they had already become a common rule in the booksellers’ trade of that time. The fact that fixed prices in the booksellers’ trade were reality from the 15th to the 17th century indicates early tendencies for modernization of economy