The volume surveys the economic and social history of the printing industry from the fifteenth century to the French Revolution, examining how government regulation, privileges, and censorship shaped production and distribution. It traces the emergence of monopoly rights and early copyright ideas, the uneasy relation between printers and medieval guild systems, and the shift to machine-based, divided labor. Chapters reconstruct workshop organization, apprenticeship, employer–employee relations, and the everyday routines and struggles of printers, drawing heavily on French sources while offering comparative sketches of European practice.