Print culture and economic constraints: A quantitative analysis of book prices in eighteenth-century Britain

Abstract

Who could afford books in the late early-modern period? We explore how prices related to the demand for books in eighteenth-century Britain by analysing extensive bibliographic and socio-economic data based on Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Our results quantify in financial terms the difficulty of buying print products faced by most British households in the eighteenth century, and how this related to the varying levels of supply across price segments. We found no evidence of the well known claim that legislation would have led to lower prices. The inadequate supply and high cost of books make it likely that only higher-income households bought them regularly from the primary market.