Carl Gerold's Sohn Verlag (Gerold Verlag)
Coordinates: 48 ° 12 '15.2 " N , 16 ° 22' 28.8" E
| Carl Gerold's Sohn Verlagbuchhandlung KG
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| legal form | KG |
| founding | 1775 |
| Seat | Vienna , Austria |
| Branch | publishing company |
| Website | www.gerold-verlag.at |
The Carl Gerold's Sohn Verlag was founded in 1775 in Vienna, making it one of the oldest publishers in German speaking countries, which exists to the present day without interruption.
Founding years
“Joseph Gerold, kais. Reichshof- und Universitäts-Buchdrucker, has the honor of notifying a venerable public that he is from Mr. Leopold Kaliwoda, kais. Reichshof- und Universitäts-Buchdruckerey, his well-known and always famous book printing company, and with the same at the same time took over its considerable book publishing house.
Both the printing house and the book publishing vault remain, as before, on Dominikanerplatz next to the Nro Church. 724.
With his zeal and diligence he flatters himself to earn the further encouragement of an inclined public. "
The eventful and exciting history of Austria's oldest publishing house begins with this advertisement in the Wienerisches Diarium on December 9, 1775. The first works were the “Hof- und Staatsschematismus” and the “Kommerzialschema der kk Residenzstadt Wien” 1780. Joseph Gerold (1750–1800) also acquired a bookshop for, as he put it in a request to Empress Maria Theresa , “some newcomers to the writers to encourage by his support to provide food for many people and thus be able to promote his own as well as the best of the state ”. On May 9, 1781, the bookstore was opened on Vienna's Kohlmarkt, "for the venerable public, for their greater convenience, in one of the most accessible areas of the city."
Leading publishing house in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy
After the publishing house had developed into a respectable company, Joseph Gerold died in 1800 at the age of 51. His wife Magdalena continued to run the publishing house with her son Johann until he too died very young in 1806. His brother Carl, actually a trained businessman, took over the family business. From 1813 the company was renamed Carl Gerold Verlag. Under Carl Gerold (1783–1854) the company developed into one of the leading publishers in the KuK monarchy . In 1852 the company moved to a new five-story building at Postgasse 6, which was built by the architects of the Vienna State Opera, August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll .
Friedrich Schiller: Austrian first edition
At that time, the demand for German works was very high, which Austrian publishers, with the tolerance of the government, satisfied with unauthorized reprints and mostly of very poor quality. The wild and unregulated reprinting of German works in the Maria Theresa and Josephine epochs led to a poor reputation among Austrian booksellers. A delegation of German publishers and booksellers, led by Friedrich Christoph Perthes and Johann Friedrich Cotta , publishers of Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Kleist, Humboldt and others, presented a memorandum to the Congress of Vienna in order to regulate these abuses. Carl Gerold supported this memorandum as head of the committee of bourgeois booksellers in Vienna against the will of his colleagues and concluded a contract with Johann Friedrich Cotta that authorized him to publish an original edition of Friedrich von Schiller's complete works in 18 volumes, intended for Austria , between 1819 and 1820 have appeared.
Forerunner of lithography
In 1816, Carl Gerold was the first Austrian book printer to introduce the new technology of stone printing or lithography , which Alois Senefelder developed in 1798. This new and inexpensive process allowed high-quality reproductions in large numbers and was also ideally suited for illustrations. Stone printing is still used today by many artists.
Censorship and freedom of the press 1848
Carl Gerold expanded his commitment to the book printing trade by taking a firm stand against the increasingly harsh censorship in the period of the Vormärz . Although he was able to get some concessions from State Chancellor Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich , it was not until the revolutionary year of 1848 that there was a substantial change and a flood of new newspapers and magazines. One of them was the still existing Austrian daily newspaper " Die Presse ", which was printed by Gerold Verlag shortly after its publication on July 3, 1848 due to the high demand. At the end of the year, Carl Gerold sold the printing plant that had been set up especially for this purpose to the “Presse” founder, August Zang, because Gerold Verlag had already published several newspapers and magazines - such as the Ostdeutsche Post , the “Lloyd” or the Wiener “Fremdblatt” under led by Gustav Heine .
The yearbooks
Long before the revolutionary year of 1848, Gerold Verlag was a pioneer in the publication of magazines. The well-known yearbooks of literature appeared as early as 1818 , one year later the yearbooks of the KK polytechnic institute in Vienna (today Vienna University of Technology ), edited by its founder Johann Joseph von Prechtl , later the “Medicinische Jahrbücher” and many more. Carl Gerold's affinity for the natural sciences, especially medicine, shaped the publisher's portfolio in the 19th century. In 1856 he was appointed "bookseller of the Imperial Academy of Sciences". The publishing house also gained a reputation as a training center for young booksellers from all over Europe. At the world exhibition in London in 1862 as well as in 1866 and 1867 the publisher was awarded for the best typographical equipment.
Publisher of famous scientists and medical professionals
The Austrian writer and administrative reformer Joseph von Sonnenfels (1732–1817), orientalist and diplomat Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), agricultural scientist Friedrich Haberlandt (1826–1878), physicist Johann Puluj (1845–1918), archaeologist Emanuel Loewy (1857–1938) and the Czech politician and historian Konstantin Jireček (1854–1918), first director of the famous Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna, were just a few of the famous authors at Gerold Verlag. The standard work by Theodor Billroth (1829-1894), one of the most important surgeons of the 19th century, “Nursing in the home and in hospitals. A handbook for families and nurses ”was published in nine editions by 1919. A work by the German universal genius Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was also published by Gerold Verlag.
The "Grillparzer case"
Although Gerold Verlag has made a name for itself in the field of natural sciences and humanities, the “fine arts” were not neglected either. Authors such as Friedrich Halm , Michael Enk von der Burg and Friedrich Hebbel , to name just a few of the numerous names, published for the publisher. One of the most famous Austrian authors would have liked to be published by Gerold Verlag, but couldn't: Franz Grillparzer . Grillparzer published his works with Johann Baptist Wallishauser in Vienna, "from a patriotic feeling", and soon felt "very limited and inhibited by the unpopular Viennese company". On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Gerold Verlag in 1875, Wenzel Johann Tomaschek wrote in a poem:
(...) Then I see a group, lyrical lights!
But also great, important poets!
I see the stalk! The lever! - and see Feuchtersleben
elevating the fortieth edition of his dietetics.
And the Grillparzer would also like to unite with them. At
least he wanted to appear at Gerold's! (...)
It was not possible to take over the author, but Gerold Verlag published Grillparzer's works as French or Italian translations. After Grillparzer's death in January 1872, Moritz von Gerold (1815–1884), Carl Gerold's son and now the new owner of the publishing house, bought the estate of the great author.
The Gerold Salon
Moritz von Gerold's wife, Rosa, played a key role in the publisher's ties to Grillparzer and in the design of the literary program . She created a literary salon, which was one of the most important centers of cultural life in the second half of the 19th century. Personalities such as Tomaschek, the philosopher Franz Brentano , Paul Heyse , Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the American writer Bayard Taylor as well as the painters Rudolf von Alt and Anselm Feuerbach gathered at the Gerolds' summer residence, the Lindenhof in Neuwaldegg .
Text and school books
In 1845 Carl Gerold founded the Association of Austrian Booksellers together with Conrad Adolf Hartleben , but the founding of the association was rejected by the government. It was not officially founded until 1859. Carl Gerold's son, Moritz von Gerold, was one of the first presidents. The Association of Austrian Booksellers was the forerunner of today's Central Association of the Austrian Book Trade (HVB).
When Moritz von Gerolds died in 1884, his younger brother Friedrich took over the management of the publishing house. Friedrich von Gerold (1813–1886) was also a member of the Vienna City Council for over a quarter of a century and “was considered the main sponsor of the school and a champion of its reform.” Since the middle of the 19th century, the publishing house has also devoted itself to the production of teaching and learning materials School books for grammar schools, secondary schools, commercial schools and the KK polytechnic institute. The mathematics textbooks in particular received great recognition.
World war and economic crisis
Friedrich von Gerold only survived his brother by three years. His son Friedrich Jr. continued to run the publishing house together with the bookseller Hermann Manz . With his death in 1895, the Gerold family's management of the publishing house ended after 120 years. Hermann Manz's widow Anna continued to run the publishing business from 1896 until the brothers Robert and Hugo Hitschmann took over in 1905, who moved the business to a new building on Hammerlingplatz and equipped it with the latest printing machines. Until the beginning of the war in 1914, agricultural publications and textbooks for secondary schools were among the publisher's best-selling works. During the First World War and in the founding years of the young Republic of Austria , numerous works were created that helped the people of that time to adapt to the new and difficult living conditions. The upheavals in the first half of the 20th century, such as the end of the monarchy, and with it the loss of a large sales market, and the economic crisis of the 1930s presented a great challenge for the publisher. Nevertheless, many interesting works were also produced in these years, such as the "Gesammelte Aufzüge 1926–1936" by the German physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick , founder of the Vienna Circle in Logical Empiricism .
The third century
Scientific works also formed a large part of the publishing program in the years after the Second World War. From the 1950s onwards there were also critical and provocative works such as “Die Methamorfosen des Eros” by Hedwig Gollob or “What is normal in the shadow of the atomic bomb” by Wolf Weilgart. In 1931 Rudolf Fürst took over the publishing house, which he ran until his death in 1975. In the same year, the company also celebrated its 200th anniversary. His wife Margarethe Fürst continued to manage the publishing house until 1980. The extensive publishing archive with numerous documents about the Gerold family is now in the Vienna City and State Library .
Today's publishing program consists primarily of non-fiction books from the fields of politics, history, technology, biographies and topics about Vienna.
literature
- Carl Junker : The Gerold House in Vienna 1775–1925. Gerold, Vienna 1925 ( PDF, pp. 203-236 on fwf.ac.at).
- 200 years of printing by Carl Gerold's Sohn. Festschrift. Gerold, Vienna 1975.
- Ingrid Jeschke: The publishing house Carl Gerold's son - its importance for the Austrian literature of the first half of the 19th century. Dissertation, University of Vienna, Vienna 1990.
- Rudolf Schmidt: German bookseller. German book printer. Volume 2, Berlin / Eberswalde 1903, pp. 303-309 ( zeno.org ).
- Sophie Pataky: Lexicon of German women of the pen. Volume 1, Berlin 1898, pp. 254-255 ( zeno.org ).
Individual evidence
- ^ Carl Junker: The Gerold House in Vienna 1775–1925 . Vienna 1925, p. 13
- ↑ 200 years of printing by Carl Gerold's Sohn , Festschrift. Vienna 1975, p. 21
- ↑ Jeschke, Vienna 1990, p. 187
- ↑ Jeschke, Vienna 1990, p. 186
- ↑ Jeschke, Vienna 1990, p. 189
- ↑ Jeschke, Vienna 1990, p. 184
- ^ Main Association of the Austrian Book Trade
- ^ Vienna City Council
- ↑ Jeschke, Vienna 1990, p. 197