27 
The History of the Book in Switzerland
27 LUKAS ERNE
Medieval book production in Switzerland chiefly took place in monastic scriptoria. The St Gall Abbey Library, the country’s oldest library, preserves a unique collection of books from the Carolingian period, many of exceptional beauty, with important miniatures and bindings. The abbey is known to have had a scriptorium as early as the 8th century, and the first known scribe, Winithar, was active in the years 761–75. From the 10th to the 12th centuries, newly founded monasteries (including the Benedictine houses at Einsiedeln, Engelberg, and Muri) acquired and produced significant collections of theological literature. In the 13th and 14th centuries, Zurich saw the production of splendidly illustrated MSS in German, made for the aristocracy or rich citizens, most notably the Manesse Codex. Apart from medieval books produced in Switzerland, a few modern libraries house collections consisting chiefly of MSS produced elsewhere. For instance, the Bongarsiana collection, in the Burgerbibliothek in Berne, comprises an important collection of medieval codices, the St Gall Abbey Library houses significant illustrated Irish MSS from the 8th century, and the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana in Cologny near Geneva, founded by Martin Bodmer, contains a number of outstanding works, including the earliest dated MS (1308) of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose.
Situated on the borders of Germany and France, on the banks of the Rhine, Basle was ideally placed to become one of Europe’s early centres of book production. The Council of Basle (1431–49) brought about important traffic in books from abroad, and the foundation of the country’s oldest university (and university library) in 1460 testified to the city’s intellectual life. Berthold Ruppel, who had worked with Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, introduced the printing trade to Basle in the 1460s; it rose to considerable significance by the 1480s, with more than 70 printers at work by the turn of the century. Among the important incunables produced in the city was Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools, 1494), printed by Johann Bergmann von Olpe, easily the most popular book in German before the Reformation.
Around 1500, humanism and the Basle book trade enjoyed a fruitful relationship which resulted in important works of biblical philology, the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin classics, and neo-Latin literature. Many of these books were of the highest typographic quality, some of them illustrated by leading artists of the time, among them Hans Holbein the younger. Important printers active in Basle at the time include Johann Amerbach, Johann Petri, and Johann Froben, who collaborated on major printing projects up to 1511. Froben’s printing house, in which a Latin bible was produced as early as 1491, became a centre of humanist book production (with books printed in Latin and Greek, as well as Hebrew) to which (among others) the humanist scholar Beatus Rhenanus contributed. Froben’s close ties to Desiderius Erasmus, who lived in Basle in 1514–15 and from 1518 to 1529, led to the publication of almost half of Erasmus’s first editions by Froben. The Basle book trade, with its solid network of agents abroad, was also of importance for the rapid spread of Martin Luther’s ideas: as early as 1518, Froben published a Latin edition of his works, followed by a second edition the following year, while Petri published Luther’s Septembertestament in December 1522, just three months after its original publication.
Although Basle was the earliest and most important centre of book production, the first dated printed book in Switzerland, Johannes Marchesinus’s Mammotrectus super Bibliam of 1470, names not Basle but Beromünster as the place of printing. Other dated incunabula were produced in Burgdorf (1475), Zurich (1479–82), Rougemont (1481), Promenthoux (1482), Lausanne (1493), and Sursee (1499–1500), but since these books were the work of itinerant printers, the locations tell us little about the significance of these places for the early book trade. The place that did become another early centre of book production before the end of the 15th century was Geneva, where printing started in 1478, with the Livre des saints anges, printed by Adam Steinschaber (a rare copy of which belongs to the British Library’s strong collection of incunables printed in Geneva). Louis Cruse (from 1479), Jean Belot (from 1497), and Wigand Köln (from 1521) were the chief Geneva printers in the following decades; but the Geneva book trade would no doubt have remained in the shadow of that of Lyons if it had not been for the Reformation. Called to Geneva by Guillaume Farel, Jean Girard (from 1536; d. 1558) became the chief printer of the works of Calvin. As the Protestant Rome, Geneva saw the publication of many important works of reformed religion, particularly bibles and psalters, although the first French Protestant translation of the Bible (1535), by Pierre-Robert Olivétan, was printed in Serrières (now part of Neuchâtel), by Pierre de Vingle. This translation was revised under the influence of Calvin, leading to the publication of the important versions of 1560 and 1588, both printed in Geneva. An Italian translation of the Bible was also printed in Geneva, in 1555, as was, in 1560, the famous English Geneva Bible as well as the first translation of the New Testament into Romansh, the fourth national language, by Jachiam Bifrun. In the 1550s a number of significant French printers escaped from religious persecution by going to Geneva, including Jean Crespin, Conrad Badius, and the Estienne family, Robert and his eldest son, the great scholar-printer Henri Estienne (whose five-volume Thesaurus Graecae Linguae was published at Geneva in 1572–3), establishing work of unprecedented quantity and quality in the Geneva book trade.
Owing to the Reformation, Zurich became the third centre of book production in Switzerland from the 1520s. Hans Hager printed a number of works by Ulrich Zwingli as well as an early edition of Luther’s translation of the New Testament. Christoph Froschauer, who published most of Zwingli’s writings, printed superb books, including the so-called Froschauerbibel (1524–9), the first Swiss folio Bible, and the Zürcher Bibel (1531). Froschauer was also long believed to be the printer of the Coverdale Bible (1535), although current scholarly opinion calls this into question. Along with humanism, the Reformation was thus the chief motor of the Swiss book trade in the early modern period. Literacy among the population remained low, however, and the proportion of people reading regularly was probably no higher than 2 per cent before and 4 per cent after the Reformation. Publishers therefore did not primarily aim at local sales, and the book fairs in Frankfurt, Leipzig, Paris, and Lyons remained of great importance for the dissemination of books produced in Switzerland. This may also explain why throughout the 16th and 17th centuries books printed in Switzerland—contrary to other European countries—mostly continued to appear in Latin rather than in the vernacular.
In the 16th century, the Catholic parts of Switzerland produced less than 1 per cent of the country’s total output, and in Fribourg printing even remained prohibited until 1584. In the 17th century, however, the Counter-Reformation led to sustained book production in Catholic parts of the country, in particular in Einsiedeln, Lucerne, and St Gall. In Einsiedeln Monastery a printing office was founded in 1664, in which massive, multi-volume works of theology and history were printed. At the same time, the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and its consequences hampered the development of the book trade, until the following century when Enlightenment doctrines led to a significant increase in the demand for secular literature. From early on, the book trade in Switzerland had been catering for an international market, but this proved particularly true in the latter half of the 18th century, when Swiss-French publishers in Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchâtel, and Yverdon flooded the international market with piracies of recently published literary and philosophical works, notably the Encyclopédie (1751–72), but also political and anti-clerical tracts, as well as erotica and pornographic literature. Of particular importance was the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, founded in 1769, whose archives have survived largely intact and constitute an invaluable source of information about the book trade and intellectual life of the 18th century, as demonstrated, most notably, in Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment.
In the course of the 19th century, reading spread thanks to newly founded lending libraries, reading groups, and book societies. For instance, the Geneva Société de lecture was founded in 1818 and acquired as many as 30,000 books within the first twenty years of its existence. In the course of the 20th century, book production in Switzerland increased from about 1,000 titles to almost 14,000 per year. Just over four-fifths of the books published at the end of the 20th century appeared in one of the national languages: 59 per cent in German, 18 per cent in French, 3 per cent in Italian, and 0.6 per cent in Rhaeto-Romanic, much of the rest being published in English. Yet these account for only about 30 per cent of the books on sale in Switzerland, with roughly 70 per cent being of foreign origins. Among Swiss publishing houses established in the 20th century are Slatkine and Droz, both based in Geneva, founded in 1918 and 1924, respectively. In the mid-20th century, Switzerland became a centre for high-quality colour book production thanks to publishers such as C. J. Bucher, Conzett & Huber, and Albert Skira.
With regards to book preservation, a number of public or private libraries today house important collections, notably the chief university libraries, the Public Library of the University of Basel, the City and University Library of Berne, the Cantonal and University Library of Fribourg, the Library of Geneva, the Public and Cantonal Library of Lausanne, the Public and University Library of Neuchâtel, and the Zurich Central Library. The Swiss National Library in Berne, founded in 1895, collects all publications relating to Switzerland and also houses the Swiss Literary Archives, created in 1989, following the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s donation of his MSS to the Confederation. The Swiss Federal Archives, which build on the archives of the Helvetian Republic founded in 1798, have similarly been housed in Berne since the early 19th century. Several museums display aspects of the history of the book, including the Basler Papiermühle, the Swiss Gutenberg Museum of Fribourg, founded in 2000, and the new museum of the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, inaugurated in 2003.
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