The two-volume set 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking provides a new, extensive collection of significant academic research on rent seeking, from its beginning to the present. It includes a number of papers that have long been out of print and many other papers from journals that few libraries or scholars will own. Researchers in the field of rent seeking will find it useful to have this collection of texts as a reference manual. The introduction provides a thorough survey of the literature and summarizes the papers included in the two volumes. The focus of Volume I is on conceptional and theoretical developments.