Among the group of publishers who were relocated from Leipzig to Wiesbaden by the Americans in June 1945 was Georg Kurt Schauer, intended to be the managing director of a branch of the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. This branch had to be closed again in October 1945 due to the new anti-centralist policy of the American military government. Only the founding of regional associations was possible. In December 1945, a "Working Committee for the Book Trade in Greater Hesse" was founded under Schauer's chairmanship. The office was initially located in Wiesbaden, but was relocated to Frankfurt am Main in the spring of 1946. On August 12, 1946, Max Niedermayer initiated the founding of a Hessian Publishers' Association in Wiesbaden and became its first chairman. Schauer then resigned from his office.

When the "Hessian Booksellers' Association" was finally founded on August 23, 1946 in Frankfurt, the publishers' association was incorporated and Niedermayer became its chairman (until 1951). In 1949, the association was renamed the "Hessischer Verleger- und Buchhändlerverband". The Frankfurt Book Fair, which was held in St. Paul's Church for the first time in 1949, can be traced back to his initiative.

In 2000, the association moved from Frankfurt to Wiesbaden, to the second floor of the Villa Clementine. On January 1, 2003, an association reform was implemented in which the "Hessian Publishers' and Booksellers' Association" became the Hesse regional association of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, whose Wiesbaden office is also responsible for the Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland regional associations.