Abraham Vandenhoeck

Abraham Vandenhoeck

Abraham Vandenhoeck (* around 1700 in The Hague ; † beginning of August 1750 in Göttingen ) was a publisher and bookseller. In 1735 he founded the Göttingen Vandenhoeck publishing house (today: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ).

life and work

At the age of about twenty, Vandenhoeck founded a print shop and bookstore in London , and in 1732 in Hamburg . Almost three years later he received an invitation to Göttingen, where he founded the publishing house that still exists today.

Münchhausen brought Vandenhoeck to Göttingen

The establishment of the company was closely related to the establishment of the Göttingen University . After the first provisional lecture was held on October 14, 1734, it soon became clear that the small Göttingen council printing plant would not be able to cope with the needs of the university. Negotiations with various printers were initially unsuccessful. On December 24th, the Hanoverian minister and first curator of the Göttingen University, Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Münchhausen , urged Professor Georg Christian Gebauer (1690–1773), who later became the first rector of the university, to act: “I ask you to think about a bookseller to promote several maturities . "

Since the Dutch book printers were considered the best at the time, Münchhausen had already written to Hamburg “whether there was a man named Abraham van Hoeck there who was a printer or bookkeeper and who had published the poemata Sapphûs graece et latine last year .” In the The answer was: "The same should not be a book printer, but a bookseller, but brought a book printer from England with him ... is 34 years old and the food is probably just bad".

Thereupon Vandenhoeck was invited to Göttingen with reimbursement of travel expenses and on February 13, 1735 was finally granted the privilege of university printer and dealer. He had conducted the contract negotiations so skillfully that Münchhausen wrote to Göttingen: "In the meanwhile, the conditions that we make van den Hoeck must be cached so that they are not made known and other people should be brought to the same postulates."

Vandenhoeck brought two printing presses to Göttingen and in 1740 worked with three typesetters and two printers. According to a list of assets from 1744, he owned a total of 80 letter boxes at that time, which meant solid equipment for a printer at the time.

The Göttingen orientalist Johann David Michaelis reported on Vandenhoeck's management of the company in a letter addressed to Münchhausen at the end of 1749: “I believe that Vandenhoeck will help himself further, because bookstore and credit have noticeably improved, even though he was right in choosing his Publishing books has its own principias and a stronger gout for translations and novels than the university is good at. Just the taste of a bookkeeper cannot be changed by an idea. ”In fact, it was more the prospect of profitable business that prompted Vandenhoeck to include novels in his publishing program at that time, because even then they promised a faster profit than scientific book productions .

Vandenhoeck published works by Johann Matthias Gesner , Albrecht von Haller and Johann Andreas von Segner , among others . Vandenhoeck developed a particularly close relationship with Haller. The scholar, who comes from Switzerland and - like Vandenhoeck - adheres to the Reformed faith, accounted for such a large proportion of the publisher's total production that Vandenhoeck was accused of working exclusively for Haller.

After Vandenhoeck's death in early August 1750, the publishing house was initially run solely by his widow Anna, nee. Perry (* May 24, 1709 in London; † March 6, 1787 in Göttingen), later together with Carl Friedrich Günther Ruprecht (* January 6, 1730 in Göttingen; † May 7, 1816 in Schleusingen ) continued and developed into one of the most important German scientific publishers of the 18th century.

literature

• Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht : February 13, 1960: 225 years of Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in Göttingen , Göttingen 1960
• Wilhelm Ruprecht: Fathers and Sons: Booksellers for Two Centuries in a German University City , Göttingen 1935