The Book A Global History

26
The History of the Book in Germany

JOHN L. FLOOD

Printing soon spread to other towns, in Germany and beyond. From Mainz it was introduced to Bamberg, an important bishopric, c.1459; here Heinrich Keffer completed the 36-line Bible by 1461. Initially, the principal centres were generally commercial cities where capital, suitable texts, and readers could be found. At Strasburg, where Gutenberg’s invention was introduced in 1459–60, early printers included Heinrich Eggestein, Johann Mentelin, Johann Prüss, and Johann Grüninger. Cologne (where printing was introduced in c.1465), a city of 35,000 inhabitants, was the largest German printing centre in the 15^th century, especially for theological books. Here the most productive printer was Heinrich Quentell; the leading publisher was Franz Birckmann, whose business extended into The Netherlands and Burgundy, and who also had a shop at St Paul’s in London. At Augsburg, the first printer was Günther Zainer in 1468. The foundation of the University of Basle in 1460 led to this city’s early importance as a printing centre from 1468–70, associated with famous humanist printer-publishers like Johann Amerbach, Johann and Adam Petri, Johann Froben, Andreas Cratander, and Johann Oporinus. At Nuremberg (1470), the leading publisher was Anton Koberger, who had 24 presses working for him.

The all-pervasiveness of the Church and of Latin meant that the book trade throughout Europe was international in scope, relatively little being published in the vernacular. Latin would predominate in the German book market for at least two centuries. Until the Reformation at least, printing did not much favour contemporary writers, publishers preferring the well-tried texts of the past. Among the few contemporary authors whose works were regularly printed in the first decades of printing were Sebastian Brant, whose Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494) became an international success once it had been mediated through Latin into French and English; and the Ulm physician Heinrich Steinhöwel, whose many translations from Latin were printed by Johann Zainer, the first printer at Ulm from 1472 onwards.

The introduction of printing did not mean a sudden break with the MS tradition. As elsewhere in Europe, the handwritten book and the printed book coexisted for some time (see 15). A phenomenon particularly characteristic of The Netherlands and Germany in the mid-15^th century was the production of Blockbooks, mostly short devotional texts (Biblia Pauperum, Apocalypse, Ars Moriendi), with text and illustrations carved into blocks of wood, inked, and transferred to paper by rubbing; the method was still being used for ABCs and similar works in the 1520s. Though the earliest typographic books were modelled on MSS, in time their appearance changed. The folio format inherited from MS culture increasingly gave way to the handier quarto and octavo. The title-page came into regular use and subsumed the function of the colophon. The abbreviations and ligatures familiar from the MS age largely disappeared from printing founts. In scholarly books, footnotes replaced marginal notes. And although outside Germany roman typefaces predominated, books in German were generally printed in gothic and books in Latin in roman.

Of the c.27,000 different books printed in the 15^th century, about 11,000 were produced in Germany, with only about 4 per cent in German. Yet works in German figured among the earliest books printed: one of Gutenberg’s first trial pieces was a German poem on the Day of Judgment, and in 1461 Albrecht Pfister printed Johannes von Tepl’s Ackermann von Böhmen and Ulrich Boner’s Edelstein at Bamberg (these two were the first typographic books to contain illustrations, with 5 and 203 woodcuts respectively). It was Augsburg, however, that was particularly noted for books in the vernacular: G. Zainer, Johannes Bämler, Anton Sorg, and Schönsperger played leading roles, each often bringing out works that one of the others had already published. Though perhaps initially not a place that one associates particularly strongly with vernacular books, several notable German works appeared in Strasburg as early as 1466–80, including Johann Mentelin’s 1466 Bible (the first printed bible in any vernacular) and his 1477 editions of the Arthurian romances Parzival and Titurel. Strasburg’s output in this field certainly expanded around 1500 and especially in the early 16^th century, when printers like Johann Grüninger, Hans Knobloch, and Bartholomaeus Kistler established reputations for illustrated works. Books in German were also printed at Basle, Nuremberg, Heidelberg, Ulm, and smaller towns like Urach, Esslingen, and Reutlingen; further north, printers at Leipzig, Cologne, Lübeck, Magdeburg, and Stendal issued books in Low German, which was then still the mother tongue of virtually everyone in that area.

Among the chief glories of early German printing were the illustrated books, particularly from Augsburg, Strasburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. They included devotional works (Cologne Bibles, c.1478; Zainer’s 1472 edition of the Golden Legend with 120 woodcuts, the first illustrated book from Augsburg), classics (the illustrations in Grüninger’s 1496 Terence are constructed from 85 interchangeable woodcut components), practical handbooks (Bämler’s 1475 Augsburg edition of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur, containing the earliest known printed botanical illustrations), chronicles (including Ulrich von Reichenthal’s History of the Council of Constance, Augsburg, 1483; the Chronicle of the Saxons, Mainz, 1492; and Koberger’s Latin and German editions of Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, Nuremberg, 1493, with 1,809 woodcuts), travel accounts (Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam,

Part of the Psalms in German from the first vernacular translation of the Bible, printed at Strassburg by Mentelin not after 1466 (GW 4295). The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Auct. Y 4.2)

Mainz, 1486), herbals, didactic works (Brant’s Narrenschiff, Basle, 1494), heroic poems (Heldenbuch, Strasburg c.1479), chivalric romances (Tristrant, Augsburg 1484; Wigoleis vom Rade, Augsburg 1493), and other popular narratives. More incunabula illustrated with woodcuts were produced in Germany than anywhere else, and this tradition continued into the 16^th century, which saw the woodcut develop into a major art form in the hands of artists like Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, and Hans Burgkmair.

By the early 16^th century, the market was already oversupplied with books. In 1504, Koberger in Nuremberg lamented that trade was not what it had been, even the Latin Bible Amerbach had printed for him at Basle between 1498 and 1502 (GW 4285) proving unsaleable. As books became more plentiful, humanist scholars began to form significant private libraries. Examples include those of Amplonius Ratinck at Erfurt, Hermann and Hartmann Schedel and Bilibald Pirckheimer at Nuremberg, Sigismund Gossembrot and Konrad Peutinger at Augsburg. The library of Beatus Rhenanus survives, still intact, at Sélestat in Alsace.

4 The 16^th century

Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible was the first of 94 Latin bibles printed in Europe in the 15^th century. Of these, no fewer than 57 appeared in German-speaking towns. Germany led the way in printed vernacular bibles too, long before the Protestant Reformers, in asserting the priesthood of all believers, contended that all Christians had the right and duty to explore scriptural truth for themselves. Starting with Mentelin’s edition of 1466, ten German bibles were already on the market by 1485 when the archbishop of Mainz attempted to ban their printing. By the time Martin Luther published his New Testament translation—based on Desiderius Erasmus’s Greek text instead of the Latin Vulgate—at Wittenberg in September 1522, fourteen editions of the complete Bible had appeared in High German (at Strasburg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg) and four in Low German (at Cologne, Lübeck, and Halberstadt). The first edition of Luther’s New Testament quickly sold out, and a revised edition (with Cranach’s woodcuts altered for reasons of censorship) appeared in December 1522; there were many reprints, authorized and unauthorized. Its popularity was such that already in 1527 Hieronymus Emser published at Dresden a rival, ‘Catholicized’ version of Luther’s translation, even though he believed that reading the Bible should be restricted to scholars. Luther’s complete Bible translation (based on Hebrew and Greek sources), first published in 1534, has influenced the German literary language just as much as the Authorized Version has influenced English. By the time of Luther’s death, at least 355 editions of his translation, or parts of it (Pentateuch, Prophets, Psalms, New Testament, Apocrypha, etc.), had been published (chiefly at Wittenberg, Augsburg, Strasburg, Nuremberg, Basle, Erfurt, and Leipzig), with at least 90 more in the Low German version (mainly from Magdeburg, Wittenberg, Erfurt, Lübeck, and Rostock).

The press was undeniably a significant factor in the success of the Reformation, but printing, especially in the vernacular, would not have developed as rapidly without its stimulus. In 1525, 60 per cent of everything printed in Germany was in German, but this was a passing phase: for the rest of the century, printing in German was about 40 per cent. Luther himself saw printing as ‘the greatest and latest gift of God, for by this means God seeks to extend the cause of true religion to the ends of the earth and to make it available in all languages’. Already by 1500, printing had been attempted in some 60 German-speaking towns and was well established in most of them; but with the torrent of pamphlets issued after 1517 the industry soon spread to a multitude of small, relatively unimportant towns—some 160 in all by 1600, and 330 by 1700. The main centres of Protestant publishing included Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Frankfurt, and Strasburg, while Catholic books were chiefly produced in Cologne, Ingolstadt, Munich, and Dillingen. By 1530, some 10,000 pamphlets had appeared, totalling nearly 10 million copies, and many more were issued throughout the century. Broadly speaking, these aimed to influence public opinion both on burning social and political issues (such as the Peasants’ War and the threat of Turkish expansion) and especially on matters concerning religion and the Church (for instance, Henry VIII’s quarrel with Luther). Some 70 per cent of titles published between 1520 and 1526 debate the fundamental importance of the Scriptures for the laity. By 1520, 32 tracts by Luther had been published in more than 500 editions, and within a few years a quarter of all German publications appeared under his name. Before he died, more than 3 million copies of his writings, excluding his Bible translations, had been printed.

The Reformation, and all it entailed, inevitably encouraged reading and stimulated book production generally: a wider range of books was being published, not least in the fields of literature, medicine, and technology. It is, however, difficult to quantify this precisely. Given the lack of exact information about the number of printing offices, the titles they published, and indeed the vague definition of ‘book’ (whether, for instance, proclamations, pamphlets, and calendars are included), estimates are largely speculative. It has been claimed that in the 16^th century 150,000 items were published in Germany, while estimates for the 17^th century range between 85,000 and 150,000, and for the 18^th century between 175,000 and 500,000.

With the growth of the book trade, patterns of business had to change. Whereas MSS were mainly produced on commission, printing was generally a speculative business, stocks being produced in the hope of finding customers for them. Distribution thus acquired a new importance. Until the 18^th century, book fairs, principally at Frankfurt and Leipzig, played a major role. Frankfurt, in the centre of Germany and readily accessible by river, was important for the distribution of scholarly books in Latin throughout Europe; books were certainly being traded there in the 1480s, decades before its first press was established. Leipzig, too, lay on major north–south, east–west trade routes. These fairs, held twice a year, around Shrovetide or Easter and at Michaelmas, provided the best opportunity for publishers to sell books in quantity to other book dealers. The book trade expanded so greatly that a guide to what was on offer became a desideratum. The initiative was seized by the Augsburg bookseller Georg Willer, who in the autumn of 1564 issued his first Frankfurt catalogue, Novorum Librorum, quos Nundinae Autumnales Francofurti Anno 1564 Celebratae Venales Exhiberunt, Catalogus; thereafter it appeared twice yearly. Books were listed first by language (Latin and Greek, then German) and within each group by subject: theology, law, medicine, the liberal arts. So successful were Willer’s catalogues that he soon had rivals. In 1598, the Frankfurt Council decided to ban the publication of private fair catalogues and to issue its own—a sensible precaution, given surveillance by the Catholic-orientated Imperial Book Commission (established in 1569 to prevent the circulation of seditious and defamatory material). Issuing an official catalogue not only enabled the council to demonstrate to the emperor that it was being vigilant, but helped it exercise stricter control of the trade by keeping a watch on the observance of printers’ privileges and ensuring that copies of books were deposited as required. The official catalogue (Mess Catalog) appeared—latterly somewhat fitfully—until about 1750. A catalogue was issued at Leipzig, too, but there it remained in private hands, being first published by Henning Grosse in 1594 and then by his successors until 1759. Because the Leipzig fairs followed those held at Frankfurt, the Leipzig catalogues generally listed the same books as the Frankfurt ones, though they often included a (sometimes substantial) section of ‘books not shown at Frankfurt’. As the first regularly appearing bulletins of recent publications, these catalogues long remained essential reading for scholars. The curators of the Bodleian Library at Oxford consulted them to select books, though from 1617 they used the London bookseller John Bill’s own English version of the Frankfurt catalogue. In 1685, Jean-Paul de La Roque, editor of the Journal des savants in Paris, remarked that until then German books had been known in France only through the Frankfurt fair catalogues. The catalogues represent a useful, if far from comprehensive, indicator of the book trade in the early modern period. Their purpose was to advertise and to generate interest, not to serve as comprehensive bibliographical aids: it is reckoned that they include only about 20–25 per cent of the books actually available. Their focus is primarily on books of scholarly interest, especially in Latin, with a potential for wide geographical dissemination, while small works, books of sermons, prayer books, university theses, and calendars scarcely feature. Fuller coverage was attempted by early efforts at cumulative bibliography such as Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (Zurich, 1545), Johannes Cless’s Unius Seculi Elenchus Librorum (Frankfurt, 1602), and Georg Draud’s Bibliotheca Classica (Frankfurt, 1611) and Bibliotheca Exotica (Frankfurt, 1625).

5 The 17^th century

The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had a devastating effect on Germany: one third of the population is believed to have perished. The economic downturn affected the quality of books, inferior paper and narrow types being used to reduce costs. (The Endters of Nuremberg were one of the few firms still producing fine books.) During the 1630s, the number of titles listed in the fair catalogues was little more than a third of what it had been in 1619, and even after the cessation of hostilities, slow economic recovery—exacerbated by plague, food shortages, and a prolonged cold spell (the ‘little Ice Age’)—meant that it was decades before the prewar level was reached again.

Although Vienna and Munich publishers effectively had a monopoly in the Catholic domains of the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs, the centre of gravity of the book trade shifted from the south to the centre and north. Even though the Lutheran Reformation had spent its force by the mid-16^th century, the Protestant book trade maintained its ascendancy over German intellectual life. The Frankfurt fair, however, lost its dominant role. Many dealers, especially foreigners, failed to resume their activities there after 1648, the restrictions imposed by the Jesuit-dominated Imperial Book Commission proving serious disincentives. The attempts of the Commission and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum to control books were largely ineffective, however, in part because their workings were arbitrary. Titles sometimes appeared on the Index simply because their authors were non-Catholics. Books in the vernacular were particularly targeted because they were intended for a wider public. One might have expected the Catholic authorities to permit Protestant books dealing with internal theological quarrels as revealing the inadequacies of their cause, but these too appeared on the Index. Often it sufficed for a book to have been printed in a Protestant town for it to be listed.

Between 1680 and 1690, publishing at Frankfurt collapsed, and Leipzig moved quickly into the forefront of the German book world. This city was favoured by its accessible position in central Europe and the privileges that the Saxon government bestowed on the trade fairs (and the liberality with which the city council interpreted them), as well as by the importance of its university. The business acumen of members of the book trade there was also a major factor in its success. It was a member of the Leipzig trade, Philipp Erasmus Reich, a partner of the firm of Weidmann (founded 1680, later Weidmann und Reich), who would eventually put an end to the Frankfurt fair by closing his Frankfurt warehouse in 1764 and encouraging others to do likewise.

As yet there was no attempt to enlarge the reading public by drawing in the bourgeoisie or the lower classes. Commonly, households might possess a bible, Luther’s catechism, an almanac, perhaps a herbal or other household medical book, a guide to letter writing, and a popular religious book, but hardly ever any imaginative literature. A great deal of popular religious writing, described on title-pages as ‘useful’ or ‘edifying’, was published. In the early 18^th century, one of the most widely read books was still Vom wahren Christenthum by the Pietist Johann Arndt, first published in 1605. Yet, such reading ensured that literacy was reasonably widespread, especially in Protestant areas.

Among the characteristic forms of publication in the 17^th century were popular, illustrated political broadsides. Thousands still survive, not only dealing with the war (the demise of Tilly, for instance, or Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden as the saviour of Lutheranism) but treating such topics as the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain, the Gunpowder Plot, and hatred for the Jesuits. Another ubiquitous form of ephemeral publication was booklets of occasional verse, often in Latin, marking birthdays, name-days, marriages, promotions, retirements, deaths, and other significant events—well over 160,000 funeral booklets alone survive. The year 1609 saw the appearance of the first two regularly numbered and dated German newsbooks, the forerunners of modern newspapers: the Wolfenbüttel Aviso, Relation oder Zeitung, and the Strasburg Relation aller Fürnemen und gedenkwürdigen Historien. The first German daily newspaper was the Neueinlaufende Nachricht von Kriegs- und Welthändeln, published by Timotheus Ritzsch at Leipzig on 1 January 1660; this became the Leipziger Zeitung in 1734 and ceased publication only in 1921.

The artistic talents that helped adorn early printed books became rarer after the mid-16^th century, and woodcuts more workaday and less imaginative. The 17^th century saw increasing use of engraving. Among the best-known examples are Johann Philipp Abelin’s Theatrum Europaeum (21 vols, 1635–1738) and various topographical works of Matthäus Merian (1593–1650) from Basle, who took over the Frankfurt business of his father-in-law, Johann Theodor de Bry, in 1624.

6 The 18^th century

In the 17^th and early 18^th centuries, the book market was still dominated by the old-fashioned polyhistor penning enormous tomes (often still in Latin) for a restricted scholarly public. Theology was particularly strongly represented. In 1650, 71 per cent of the books in the Leipzig catalogues were in Latin; in 1701, 55 per cent; but in 1740, only 27 per cent; in 1770, 14 per cent; and only 4 per cent in 1800. The proportion of books produced in Latin was higher in university towns such as Jena and Tübingen than in commercial centres like Augsburg and Hamburg. The catalogues also show (notwithstanding their limitations) that the proportions of books in the categories of ‘religious literature for the layman’ (devotional works, sermons) and ‘imaginative literature’ (including novels, drama, and poetry) were inverted between 1740 and 1800—the former representing nearly 20 per cent and the latter barely 6 per cent of the total books on offer at the earlier date, and under 6 per cent and more than 21 per cent respectively at the end of the period. In general, the book trade expanded fourfold during the 18^th century. The mid-century saw the emergence of the popularizing writer who made knowledge available in German for a wider readership. The numbers of books in the fields of philosophy, philology, pedagogy, natural sciences, and economics increased to some 40 per cent, while belles-lettres grew almost tenfold, from 2.8 per cent in 1700 to 21.5 per cent in 1800. At this date, theology represented only about 13 per cent of the total.

By about 1740, the position of writers was changing and the potential public for imaginative literature was expanding. In the 17^th century, there had not yet emerged a profession of letters as such. Writers had depended on their main occupations or professions for any social respect they enjoyed; anyone hoping to live by his pen was invariably doomed to contempt and poverty. Writers had been primarily scholars: professors, schoolmasters, or clergymen. Aristocrats would have considered it unseemly to be seen as dependent on their pens, and bourgeois writers would emphasize that their writing was merely the product of their leisure hours. In the 18^th century, the role of aristocratic literary patrons declined, and that of the commercial publisher grew.

An important development in the 18^th century was the emergence of the novel. Earlier, novels had been of a learned character, intended not for popular consumption but rather for aristocratic or scholarly readers well acquainted with the events and personalities of ancient and contemporary history, classical mythology, and the works of ancient philosophers and poets. A good example is Die Römische Octavia by Anton Ulrich, duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1633–1714). Such novels primarily reflected the absolutist court ideal, and served as vehicles for moral or political ideas of the kind young noblemen were expected to imbibe. In the 18^th century, however, a market developed for travel novels, love stories, ghost stories, novels about knights and robbers, and more besides. The epistolary novel became fashionable, Goethe’s Werther (1774) becoming the best-seller of the century, with authorized editions far outnumbered by piracies and translations. Translated works were also attractive to publishers, who did not need to pay authors an honorarium, only a translator’s fee. Foreign authors popular in Germany included Richardson, Sterne, and (earlier) Defoe. Three translations of Robinson Crusoe (1719) appeared within a year: one translation saw five editions in 1720 alone. Crusoe precipitated a flood of German imitations, the best of which was Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s four-volume Insel Felsenburg (1731–43), in which four shipwrecked travellers seek to live in harmony in an ideal social community that contrasts sharply with contemporary German society. This novel, frequently reissued and reprinted in pirated editions, came to be found next to the Bible in all pious middle-class homes. Another, later excrescence of the craze for ‘Robinsonades’ was Der schweizerische Robinson (1812)—written by Johann David Wyss of Berne—known to generations of English readers as The Swiss Family Robinson.

Numerous distinguished publishing houses emerged in the 18^th century. At Stuttgart, Johann Friedrich Cotta is famous for his 60-volume Goethe edition. At Leipzig, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf (1719–94) became renowned for innovations in printing complicated music from movable type; the firm’s successor, Breitkopf & Härtel, established in 1796, remains one of the leading names in music publishing. Another Leipzig firm was Georg Joachim Göschen (1752–1828), whose most prominent authors were Schiller, Goethe, and Wieland. His Wieland edition, printed in roman instead of ‘monkish’ Fraktur, failed to be the pioneering success it might have been because other printing houses considered it too expensive to re-equip themselves with roman types, and the public was too inured to reading German in Fraktur to want to change. Johann Friedrich Unger at Berlin, who published Goethe, Schiller, and also the early Romantics—including August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare—was likewise interested in typography. He helped promote Firmin Didot’s roman letter in Germany but, faced with continuing opposition to roman, he devised a lighter gothic type, the ‘Unger-Fraktur’, intended to assist foreign readers unfamiliar with the traditional Fraktur then still generally in use; Unger’s type extended the life of Fraktur in Germany.

The growth of the reading public in the 18^th century led to reorganization of the book trade. Whereas previously the publisher-bookseller had dominated, with trade being conducted on an exchange basis largely through the book fairs, from the mid-18^th century publishing and bookselling evolved into separate activities. The advantage of the exchange system, with printer-publishers and booksellers trading books primarily according to the quantity of paper involved, had been that it obviated the need to hold considerable capital in the form of cash; moreover, it facilitated trade between the various territories in the empire (with their different currencies) as well as the international trade in Latin books. The disadvantages were that many booksellers found themselves sitting on a wide-ranging, unspecialized collection of sometimes quite unsaleable books, without adequate liquid capital to finance new ventures or pay authors who increasingly wanted to be paid in money, not in books.

The lack of an effective central government in Germany meant that publishing was still carried on under exclusive regulations in each individual state. This perhaps worked well enough while the book market was relatively small, but became problematic as it expanded. The most urgent needs were for a general system of copyright and for measures to prevent the production of cheap, shod-dily printed unauthorized editions in other territories. Such piracy was not only widely tolerated but, in some states, even encouraged. The demise of the Frankfurt fair and the inconvenience of the long journey to Leipzig meant that piracy particularly flourished in many south German towns, printers there seeing this as a legitimate response to the monopolies and higher prices of Leipzig publishers. The pirate publishers—who paid no authors’ fees, printed only successful works, and often used the cheapest paper—contributed in no small measure to making books cheaper and thereby encouraging reading. One of the worst offenders was Johann Thomas von Trattner in Vienna, who was abetted even by the imperial court; he employed fifteen presses in a large-scale operation to produce cheap reprints. His leading opponent was Philipp Erasmus Reich in Leipzig, who in 1764 attempted to form a protective organization and found support in most of the large towns in northern Germany, as well as in Nuremberg and Ulm. Leipzig publishers abandoned the old exchange system and began to insist that booksellers pay in cash and maintain no right to return unsold books. While this had some positive effects—publishers flush with cash were now able to contemplate new projects and authors could expect larger fees—it also meant that readers faced higher prices for books. In 1773 the sale of unauthorized editions at Leipzig was prohibited, but the pirates resorted to selling their wares through travelling salesmen who visited localities where books had previously been a rarity. In the absence of central government, there was little authors or publishers could do to remedy the situation. Even after the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, little changed: in 1815 the kingdoms of Württemberg and Bavaria both expressly permitted the reprinting of ‘foreign’ books, that is, those published beyond their own narrow confines. It was not until well into the 19^th century that general protection could be guaranteed. The first work granted full copyright protection, recognized throughout Germany, was Cotta’s Goethe edition (1827–30).

One manifestation of the 18^th-century Enlightenment was a tremendous growth in the publishing of encyclopaedias and reference works and an explosion in the publication of journals and almanacs. The first major German encyclopaedia was Johann Heinrich Zedler’s 68-volume Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste (Halle and Leipzig, 1732–54). It was innovative in two respects: it was the first such work written by a team of editors, each responsible for a particular field of knowledge, and it included biographies of living persons. The first German periodical, the Acta Eruditorum, launched at Leipzig in 1682, was a scholarly journal in the mould of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London; but Christian Thomasius’s Monatsgespräche, published from 1688, marked the beginning of a new age with articles on a wide range of topics and reviews of new publications, presented to a broader public in German. By the mid-18^th century, hundreds of similar weeklies and monthlies were appearing, mostly in university towns like Halle, Leipzig, and Jena, but also in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg, addressing themselves not to a scholarly public but to the bourgeoisie, and aiming to instruct in a pleasant and entertaining way. The earlier part of the century also saw the launch of imitations of English moral weeklies: Der Vernünfftler (1713), Der Patriot (1724), and others were modelled on Addison and Steele’s Tatler (founded 1709) and Spectator (1711). Then came more specifically literary journals such as Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (1765–1806) and Christoph Martin Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur (1773–1810), emulating the Mercure de France. Others fostered interest in foreign literature, such as Johann Joachim Eschenburg’s Brittisches Museum für die Deutschen (1777–80). Noteworthy, too, are some early journals for women readers, including Johann Georg Jacobi’s Iris (1774–6), Christian Gottfried Schütz’s Akademie der Grazien (1774–80), and many others, most of them short-lived. By publishing texts and reviews, these journals encouraged a love of literature and sharpened readers’ critical faculties.

Altogether 2,191 journals of all kinds began publication between 1766 and 1790—three times as many as in the previous 25 years. The resonance they found may be gauged from the lively debate engendered by Moses Mendelssohn’s and Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784. Particularly influential was the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, published six times a week by Bertuch in Jena, which reviewed the latest German and foreign books. Bertuch also published the Journal des Luxus und der Mode—one of the earliest illustrated magazines—which remains a valuable source of information about men’s and women’s fashions and the domestic scene around 1800. Another of Bertuch’s ventures was London und Paris, published until 1815, which informed readers about the social scene in the British and French metropolises. While London und Paris merely reported on the French political scene following the Revolution, other journals—such as J. F. Unger’s Deutschland, with its pronounced republican sympathies, and the conservative Wiener Zeitschrift—more actively espoused politics of various hues. By contrast, with Die Horen Friedrich Schiller strove ‘to unite the politically fragmented world under the flag of truth and beauty’. It called forth a wave of new literary journals, which, though generally short-lived, testified to the vitality of the Romantic Age. The most important of these was Athenaeum (1798–1800), edited by Friedrich and A. W. Schlegel.

Almanacs, catering for almost every profession, interest, or taste, were a special feature of 18^th-century German publishing. Examples include the Gothaischer Hofkalender or Almanach de Gotha, first published in 1763, and Schiller’s Historisches Kalender für Damen, published by Göschen (1790–94). They contained contributions by leading writers and poets and were often illustrated by well-known artists such as Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki.

Germany had always been well supplied with libraries, but access was generally privileged. Many religious houses held significant collections, often splendidly housed (as at Ottobeuren, Kremsmünster, Melk, Einsiedeln, St Gall, Schussenried, and Admont). The 17^th century had been the age of the great private and court libraries, among them those of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, Duke August of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1579–1666) at Wolfenbüttel, the imperial court library at Vienna (founded 1493, now the Austrian National Library), and the Royal Library at Berlin (founded 1661). Several towns had old-established Ratsbibliotheken, municipal libraries intended for the use of city councillors and other worthies. Such collections had existed since the late 14^th century in Nuremberg and Regensburg, while Lüneburg, Braunschweig, Hanover, Leipzig, Lübeck, Hamburg, and Frankfurt followed in the 15^th, with others founded in the 16^th, often as a direct consequence of Luther’s encouragement of town councils to enhance library provision. A few libraries actually called themselves ‘public’, but they were generally poorly stocked and had extremely restricted opening hours—the one in Bremen was accessible only fortnightly on Wednesdays, for example. Even university libraries were hardly user-friendly: those at Leipzig and Halle were open for only four hours a week, and it was considered a real novelty when Göttingen, on its foundation in 1734, opened its library every day to staff and students and allowed them to borrow books—from the outset, this library was conceived as a research facility. As the reading habit grew, so too did demand for access to books. This resulted in the establishment of lending libraries and ‘reading societies’, which in turn stimulated the demand for more books. A lending library open to all-comers had been founded in Berlin as early as 1704, but only somewhat later did these proliferate: Braunschweig had one in 1767, Hanau 1774, Munich 1774, Schwäbisch Hall 1784, Giessen 1785, Stuttgart 1791, Bamberg 1795, and Breslau 1800, for instance. One enterprising Leipzig book dealer, Sommer, sold bargain-priced ‘starter collections’ of up to 500 volumes to people wanting to establish libraries. Reading societies (Lesegesellschaften) were established in many towns: 13 by 1770, a further 50 by 1780, and about 370 more by 1800. The one at Stralsund, founded in 1779, specialized in lighter fare such as novels, plays, and poems, but others provided more generally for philosophy, theology, history, and geography. These societies aimed to give members—mostly the better-educated middle class—the opportunity to read as inexpensively as possible. Books and journals might be circulated among members or made available in a common reading room. Contemporary observers, critical of a perceived ‘mania’ for reading, advocated attempts to direct readers towards what was ‘useful’, with the aim of fostering good Christians, obedient subjects, and committed workers. A notably successful example of such ‘improving’ reading-matter, aimed at countryfolk, was Rudolf Zacharias Becker’s Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute (1788); by 1811 a million copies had been produced, many of which had been foisted by territorial princes on their unsuspecting subjects. Other works were targeted at women, servants, children, and young people.

Great libraries have at all times been threatened with plunder and dispersal. The Palatine library at Heidelberg was removed to the Vatican in 1623; Gustavus Adolphus took many books from Catholic libraries to Sweden at about the same time (see 28). Napoleon is said to have looted 10,000 incunabula from libraries on the west bank of the Rhine; about 100 Jesuit libraries were closed in Germany alone in 1773. From 1783, 1,300 monastic libraries were confiscated, and hundreds more were secularized around 1803. Their MSS and incunabula substantially enriched court and university libraries—thus, what is now the Bavarian State Library (which holds the second largest collection of incunabula in the world) at Munich became the largest German library in the 19^th century. About this time, a number of smaller universities were also closed and their collections were amalgamated with other university libraries. Germany, being decentralized, still has no true national library; instead, it relies on a collaborative network of state and university libraries.

7 The 19^th century

The 19^th century saw decisive developments in book production. New inventions reduced production costs, and increasing literacy created further demands for books. The writing profession expanded considerably. As early as 1777, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg asserted, ‘There are assuredly more writers in Germany than all four continents need for their wellbeing’, and in 1785 it was claimed that ‘the army of German writers’ was 5,500 strong. By 1800, no fewer than 10,648 Germans were calling themselves writers, a figure that, by 1900, rose to 20,000 and included hundreds of women writers, 70 per cent of whom wrote under male pseudonyms. The number of bookshops grew from 300 to 5,000 during the century, and the annual output of titles increased from 3,906 in 1800 to 14,039 in 1843, and 24,792 in 1900. The number of periodicals and newspapers grew from under 1,000 around 1800 to 5,632 in 1902, with the real growth coming in the last third of the century. Music publishing increased by 250 per cent between 1871 and 1900. Growth was further fostered by improvements in communications (railways, telegraph, telephone) and the emergence of railway bookstalls, department stores, and mail order. Series for travellers began to appear in the 1850s (such as F. A. Brockhaus’s Reisebibliothek für Eisenbahn und Schiffe, 1856–61) on the model of George Routledge’s Railway Library (1848). The 19^th century was the heyday of serial novels, marketed through itinerant booksellers. Late in the century, there were an estimated 45,000 men peddling books to 20 million readers throughout Germany and Austria. The 19^th century also saw the foundation of the earliest book clubs, offering subscribers new books at advantageous prices. The earliest, apparently, was the Verein zur Verbreitung guter katholischer Bücher, founded in 1829. The Litter-arischer Verein in Stuttgart, founded in 1839, specialized in scholarly editions of older literary works, many of which have still not been superseded. Later, 20^th-century book clubs included the Büchergilde Gutenberg and the Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, both founded in 1924. Among the newcomers after World War II were the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft with 140,000 members, originally designed to reissue standard works of scholarship that had become unobtainable since the war, and the Bertelsmann Club (with some 4.7 million members and 300 branches in Germany alone).

Among the inventions that led to cheap editions were wood-pulp paper—achieved as a practical process by Friedrich Gottlob Keller in 1843—and the steam press, devised by Friedrich König. Steam-driven presses were first put to use by The Times in 1814 and employed for the printing of books by Brockhaus at Leipzig in 1826. Planographic lithography, invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798, represented a major step forward in the reproduction of illustrations. The advantages such innovations conferred went hand in hand with improvements in the organization of the book trade, especially through the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, established at Leipzig in 1825 and soon embracing publishers, wholesalers, and retailers of books throughout the German-speaking world. In 1887, the Börsenverein introduced a net price agreement, saving smaller booksellers from being undercut by unscrupulous profiteers. Though the German states lagged behind England and France in introducing copyright laws, the grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar was the very first, in 1839, to incorporate the principle of a 30-year term of protection after the author’s death. Copyright was confirmed throughout Germany in 1871 and internationally by the Berne Convention in 1886.

An important issue in publishing during the first half of the 19^th century was the struggle for freedom of the press. Political journalism expanded spectacularly during the century (200 titles in 1800; 1,012 in 1847; 1,300 in 1862; 2,427 in 1881; 3,405 in 1897; and 4,221 in 1914). Restrictions were somewhat less irksome in Saxony than in Metternich’s Austria, but everywhere publishers fought courageous battles against censorship and police control. Concessions were made in 1848, but rescinded in 1851—the situation improving only in 1874, when censorship was finally abolished, though even then the writings of many social democrats were banned (2,592 items between 1878 and 1918).

One vigorous campaigner in the battle for freedom was the Leipzig publisher Reclam, remembered today above all for Reclams Universalbibliothek, a series he founded in 1867 (and still going strong) which brought to the masses the works of writers of all periods in good, cheap editions. Reclam had already had a remarkable success with an inexpensive twelve-volume edition of Shakespeare in 1858, reprinted six times within a year and followed by editions of 25 individual plays in 1865. The Universalbibliothek was inaugurated with Goethe’s Faust, but the most popular title has proved to be Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, with well over 2 million copies sold. By 1892 the series comprised 3,000 titles. The texts were reliable but produced as economically as possible—Reclam was one of the first German publishers to use stereotypes extensively. The paper-covered editions were available singly, and for half a century the price was kept at 20 pfennigs a copy, thus enabling even the most impecunious to gain access to great literature. In 1917 Reclam started selling titles through vending machines on 1,600 railway stations, in hospitals, and even on transatlantic liners. So immediately recognizable was Reclam’s design that during the two world wars, propaganda pamphlets made up to look like Reclams were disseminated among German front-line troops.

Other successful 19^th-century Leipzig publishers included Karl Christoph Traugott Tauchnitz. Around 1816, he produced cheap editions of the Greek and Latin classics employing the stereotype process, which he was the first to use in Germany. In 1837, his nephew Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz established his own business, which became famous for its Collection of British and American Authors, founded in 1841: this eventually comprised some 5,400 titles. Tauchnitz secured the goodwill of authors by voluntarily paying them a royalty and undertaking not to sell the books in Britain or its empire. Another Leipzig publisher was Teubner, renowned for editions of the Greek and Latin classics, as well as mathematical books and other scholarly works. Teubner, like Cotta and others, sometimes co-published works with Black, Young, & Young of Tavistock Street, London. F. A. Brockhaus, who originally worked under Teubner, established his reputation with his Conversationslexikon (1812), which in its present form, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (21e, 2005–6), is still the leading German encyclopaedia. The early success of the Conversationslexikon demonstrated the tremendous potential for sales among the middle classes. In 1984 Brockhaus amalgamated with Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim, publisher of Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon (9e, 1971–9), which originated in Meyer’s Großes Lexikon für die gebildeten Stände (52 vols, 1839–55). Another well-known firm linked with Leipzig, though only after relocating there in 1872, was Baedeker, publisher of the renowned series of travel guides; the firm began when in 1832 Karl Baedeker acquired the Koblenz publisher Friedrich Rähling and with it J. A. Klein’s Rheinreise von Mainz bis Köln (1828).

The early 19^th century saw the founding of three influential literary journals: Zeitung für die elegante Welt (1801–59), August von Kotzebue’s Der Freimüthige (1803–56), and, most important of all, Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (1807–65). The huge growth in publishing is reflected in the need for reviews like the Heidelberg Jahrbücher der Literatur (1808–72) and the Wiener Jahrbücher (1818–49), while the more popular end of the market was catered for by J. J. Weber’s enormously successful Pfennig-Magazin (1833–55), modelled on the English Penny Magazine. Another of Weber’s ventures, launched in 1843, was the Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, modelled on the Illustrated London News. As censorship restrictions were relaxed, ever more periodicals and magazines came on to the market. The Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, which started with an edition of 14,000 copies in the 1890s, had sales of more than a million copies by 1914. Then there were family magazines like Die Gartenlaube (from 1853) and Westermanns illustrirte Monatshefte (from 1856), both of them long-lived. The satirical journal Simplicissimus was founded in 1896. Although they were the forerunners of the magazines we know today, they were not scandal sheets, but were published to inform and educate a broader reading public.

8 The 20^th century

Throughout the 19^th century Leipzig publishers led the field in Germany, though the quality of their typography, paper, illustrations, and binding was often far from outstanding. The turn of the century, however, saw growing interest in book design based on the traditions of earlier periods. William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement resonated in Germany, where like-minded people tried to link new artistic forms with an appreciation of materials and craftsmanship to create a harmonious combination of type, paper, illustration, and binding. Notable examples of this trend were the magazines Pan and Jugend (from which the term Jugendstil derives). A number of private presses on the English model were founded, such as Carl Ernst Poeschel’s and Walther Tiemann’s Janus-Presse (1907); the Bremer Presse (1911), influenced by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson; and the Cranach-Presse, established by Harry Graf Kessler who emulated the Kelmscott and the Doves presses. After about 1910, the decorative, flowing forms of Jugendstil increasingly contrasted with the hard, broken forms of Expressionism—among whose exponents as book illustrators were Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach, and Alfred Kubin. The growing number of design-conscious mainstream publishers included Anton Kippenberg of the Insel-Verlag in Leipzig, Eugen Diederichs at Düsseldorf, and Hans von Weber, who founded his Hyperion-Verlag in Munich in 1906.

The momentous political events that overwhelmed Germany in the 20^th century inevitably affected the book trade. In 1922–3 it was devastated by galloping inflation. Soon after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, one of the most notorious episodes took place when nationalistically minded students set fire to thousands of Jewish, socialist, and other ‘un-German’ books in various university towns on 10 May 1933. The works of Freud, Marx, Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, and hundreds of others were ceremoniously burnt. These events presaged tighter control of the production and distribution of written material. Authors wanting to continue publishing were obliged to join the Reichsschrifttumkammer, established under the aegis of Goebbels’s Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda in September 1933. Publishers and booksellers were made to toe the line in the same way. Thus, in 1934 the Jewish firm of Ullstein was ‘Aryanized’. While a small number of Jewish publishers such as the Schocken-Verlag were initially tolerated, from the end of 1938 all Jewish businesses were forbidden. Lists of prohibited books and authors were drawn up, but these were not divulged to the book trade, so that booksellers needed to be extremely circumspect in selecting their stock. The works of émigré authors such as Thomas Mann and ‘decadent’ writers such as Robert Musil and Joseph Roth were forbidden, and books were removed from libraries or placed under restrictions. Concomitant with such repressive measures were various initiatives to promote officially approved works—couples getting married were presented with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

World War II and the postwar division of Germany inevitably had enormous consequences for both library provision and the book trade. Many libraries were destroyed (15–20 million books were lost), though precautions had been taken to evacuate some major collections: the Prussian State Library’s stock of 3 million books and 71,600 MSS was dispersed from Berlin to some 30 sites throughout the country. After the war, some material returned to the original building on Unter den Linden in East Berlin, while other parts of the collection formed the nucleus of a new library in West Berlin; much valuable material has still not yet returned from Cracow (Poland). Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the two libraries were unified, administratively, though not physically. As for publishing, output—which had stood at 24,792 new titles in 1900, 34,871 in 1913, and 37,886 in 1927—fell to 20,120 in 1938 and 5,304 in 1944. Leipzig, the centre of the industry, was largely destroyed by bombing in December 1943: Reclam’s stock was lost, and though their printing works survived unscathed, the equipment was taken by the Russians as war reparations in 1946. After the war, the Occupying Powers (Britain, France, USA, and the Soviet Union) initially forbade the production and dissemination of printed material, confiscated National Socialist and militaristic literature, and introduced censorship. Gradually, the Four Powers issued licences and German publishing burgeoned again, though developments varied somewhat in the different zones of occupation. The first licence for the publication of books in the British Sector of Berlin was granted on 3 October 1945 to Walter de Gruyter Verlag, whose roots go back to 1749. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the former Soviet Zone of Occupation, almost all publishing firms passed into state control. Thus, long-established firms like Breitkopf & Härtel, Brockhaus, Insel, and Reclam at Leipzig, and Niemeyer at Halle, were taken into state ownership as Volkseigene Betriebe (VEB), while the same firms re-established themselves as private companies in the West—Breitkopf & Härtel at Kassel, Brockhaus at Wiesbaden, Insel at Frankfurt, Reclam at Stuttgart, and Niemeyer at Tübingen. The West German publishing industry recovered so quickly that the expectations of Swiss publishers that they would be able to step into the breach were scarcely realized (see 27). West German output increased from 14,094 titles in 1951, to 42,957 in 1971, and 63,679 in 1986. In the GDR, production grew from 1,998 in 1949 to 6,471 in 1985, and publishing was affected by tense power struggles between authors, publishers, the political leadership, and the State Security Service (the ‘Stasi’). Since the reunification of Germany, considerable reorganization of the publishing industry has taken place. In 2004, German publishers issued 86,543 titles in 963 million copies. Recent years have seen increasing tendencies towards globalization, in which German publishing houses such as Bertelsmann and Springer play major roles. Bertelsmann, which today operates in 63 countries and has 95,000 employees, with a turnover of 17.9 billion euros in 2005, was founded as a small publisher of bibles and religious literature at Gütersloh in 1835. After 1850 it broadened its range, and during World War II it became a leading supplier of reading matter to soldiers at the front. Its premises were destroyed in 1945, but in 1946 it began afresh, receiving a licence to publish from the British Military Government. It launched its book club in 1950, moved into gramophone records in 1958, collaborated with AOL to promote multimedia in 1995, acquired the New York publisher Random House (which includes such well-known names as Chatto & Windus, Bodley Head, Jonathan Cape, and Virago) in 1998, and entered into partnership with Sony Corporation to produce music and videos in 2004. Similarly, Springer-Verlag, which was part of the Bertelsmann empire from 1999 to 2003, began in 1842 as a Berlin bookshop founded by Julius Springer, who published a few political and general magazines. Today Springer, based at Heidelberg, is a world leader in the fields of science, medicine, economics, engineering, architecture, construction, and transport.

One of the most obvious changes in the appearance of German books since the middle of the 20^th century, the abandoning of Fraktur, is a legacy of National Socialism. German texts had customarily been printed in gothic types since the 16^th century, partly rejecting foreign (especially Italian) influence, partly from national pride, and partly from Lutheran rejection of Roman Catholicism. In 1794 the Berlin publisher Nicolai described gothic type as a truly national script that would encourage a wider national ethos. When the Brothers Grimm began publishing their Deutsches Wörterbuch in roman type in 1852, some critics were fiercely hostile. After the creation of the Reich in 1871, support grew for Fraktur as a truly German script—Bismarck claimed he would refuse to read a German book that was not printed in gothic type, for ‘a German word in Latin letters is as alien as a Greek word in German letters’—and the Reichstag was petitioned on the matter, though in 1911 it decided not to proceed. But the continuing preference for gothic typefaces deterred foreign readers—even conservative Sweden had increasingly adopted roman, largely under the influence of Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), who induced the government to abolish customs duty on Dutch roman type. For scholars and scientists hoping to reach an international readership, Fraktur was an obstacle, so books intended for such an audience were often printed in roman. Yet domestic readers preferred Fraktur as being more legible and easier on the eyes. In the 1930s, the National Socialists were inclined to enforce its use as an expression of the Nordic soul—only with difficulty were they persuaded by the ministry of transport that it would be unsafe to use Fraktur for road signs at the time of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. However, the matter was settled once and for all when on 3 January 1941 Hitler declared gothic type to be a Jewish invention and ordered that henceforth roman should be the norm. ‘A century from now,’ he said, ‘our language will be the European language. Countries to the east, north, and west of us will learn our language in order to be able to communicate with us. The prerequisite of this is the replacement of so-called gothic script by the script previously known as Latin script and which we now call normal script.’ Thereafter, editions of Mein Kampf and of the party newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, were duly printed in roman, and very soon this ousted Fraktur almost entirely except for ornamental purposes. The last major newspaper to adopt roman was the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in 1946.

A recent development that initially occasioned great controversy and even led to lawsuits before the Federal Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe, but which ultimately has had little effect on the appearance of books, was the spelling reform ratified by the governments of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 1996, introduced in 1998 and, in theory, finally implemented in 2005. A final important development concerns recent progress towards the creation of a proper German national library. As indicated earlier, Germany essentially relies on a collaborative network of state and university libraries with particular responsibilities for research-level provision. There is still no national library in the sense of a single institution with a comprehensive collection embracing both current titles and historical depth. The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, established in its present form in 2006, brings together under a single umbrella two physically separate institutions: the Deutsche Bücherei, founded in Leipzig in 1912, and the Deutsche Bibliothek, set up in 1946 at Frankfurt-am-Main. Its task is to form, catalogue, and conserve a complete collection of all material published in German since 1913, including material in German or relating to Germany published outside its borders, translations of German works, and editions of German émigré authors published between 1933 and 1945. Publishers are required to deposit two copies of each book with either the Leipzig or the Frankfurt branch, one copy then being transmitted to the other location, thus building up two parallel collections (a wise precaution given the turmoil of the 20^th century). The total holdings ran to c.27 million items in 2011.

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