Mason,

Thank you for the Roy Thompson reference.
I was unaware of it.


Robert Dimand,

Thank you for your input on what Fisher knew and when and so on.
It would appear that whatever else he read in German on forestry,
Faustmann was probably not part of it, although he perhaps read von
Thunen, although his writing on forestry was more about where they
should be located rather than the question of optimal rotation.

The Fujita-Krugman business is a sideshow here.  Yes, they did
write both a book with Venables in 1999 as well as some papers
together in the late 1990s, well after the 1988 paper by Fujita
and the 1991 paper by Krugman.  After Krugman got his prize,
Fujita published a paper with Jacques-Francois Thisse in Regional
Science and Urban Economics,
"New economic geography: an appraisal on the occasion of Paul
Krugman's 2008 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences," March 2009,
39(2), pp. 109-119.  I reproduce the abstract from that paper.

"Paul Krugman has clarified the microeconomic underpinnings of
both spatial economic agglomerations and regional imbalances at
national and international levels.  He has achieved this with a
series of remarkably original papers and books that succeed in
combining imperfect competition, increasing returns, and
transportation costs in new and powerful ways.  Yet, not
everything was brand new in Economic Geography.  To be precise,
several disparate pieces of high-quality work were available in
urban economics and location theory.  Our purpose in this paper
is to shed new light on economic geography through the lenses of
these two fields of economics and regional science."

Barkley Rosser