Diogenes Publishing House

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DIOGENES VERLAG AG

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1952
Seat SwitzerlandSwitzerland Zurich
management Philipp Keel
Number of employees 70
Branch Book publisher
Website www.diogenes.ch

The Diogenes Verlag is an established in 1952 the Swiss publishing house . The total circulation is over 300 million copies. So far, over 7600 titles published, of which about 1,800 still displaced are.

Since 1963 Diogenes Verlag has published the journal ink bottle .

history

Until 1970

Daniel Keel (1930–2011) founded Diogenes Verlag in 1952 at Merkurstrasse 70 in Zurich. The first book published by Ronald Searle Because the lamp is still glowing . A year later, the publisher took part in the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time . Get on the Dog , Loriot's first book in the publishing house, was published in 1954. Keel's friend Rudolf C. Bettschart (1930–2015) took care of the bookkeeping and organization of the publishing house in his spare time. In 1957 and 1958 the first program focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature and crime stories. In the same year the first book by the French draftsman Sempé was published .

In 1960 the publishing house moved to Rämistrasse 33. Keel opened his Daniel Keel gallery on the ground floor. The first books by Tomi Ungerer , Muriel Spark and Roland Topor were published . On November 1, 1961, Rudolf C. Bettschart joined the publishing house full-time and took over the accounting. In 1963, with the children's books by Reiner Zimnik and Tomi Ungerer, the children's book department and with Molière the theater department were created. In 1964 Otto Jägersberg's debut , Weihrauch und Pumpernickel , was published and became the first German-speaking success. In the following year, other authors such as Eric Ambler and Patricia Highsmith joined them. With the Diogenes Narrator Library , a book series was launched which outwardly resembled the Manesse Library of World Literature , but focused on prose classics of the 20th century.

Rudolf C. Bettschart was just able to save the publishing house from bankruptcy in 1966 . The company was transformed into a stock corporation with Keel and Bettschart as partners. Also in 1966, the publishing house began to publish Jules Verne's main works in new, true-to-original translations with the illustrations of the original French editions. The first to appear were 20,000 Leagues Under Sea , From Earth to Moon and Journey Around Earth in Eighty Days . In 1967 Alfred Andersch moved to Diogenes Verlag, his book Efraim made it onto the Spiegel bestseller list as the publisher's first novel . With an initial print run of 50,000 copies, the publishing house hit the jackpot: Loriot's great guide appeared. In addition, Patricia Highsmith's first book, Venice can be very cold , was published.

1970s

In 1970 the publishing house moved once more: to Speakers Street 8, where it is still based today. A year later, the first paperbacks appeared under the name detebe . In addition, the ISBN was introduced . In 1972 the publisher was not represented at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Two years later, the crime novels appeared with a black and yellow cover for the first time. Alfred Andersch published his last novel, Winterspelt .

In 1975 Tomi Ungerer designed the large song book , a collection of well-known songs. The book became one of the greatest successes in publishing history. In 1976 Alfred Andersch published his poem article 3 (3) in the Frankfurter Rundschau , which became one of the biggest German feature pages scandals: Andersch criticized the so-called radical decree, which was mainly directed against communists. This was followed by angry letters to the editor, Andersch was insulted as a left-wing fascist who played down the Third Reich . The program director of the SWF , Dieter Stolte , forbade the moderator Jürgen Lodemann to read the poem in his program Literaturmagazin . It was precisely because of this that the poem - in an involuntary way - attracted great attention.

In 1977 the publishing house existed for 25 years. It seemed to Balzac's Human Comedy . One year later, FK Waechter joined the authors of the publishing house, whose cartoon band Probably no pig looks again became a success. Still, there were other financial difficulties. In 1979, Diogenes Verlag boycotted the Frankfurt Book Fair again, this time for quality reasons. The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt moved from Arche Verlag to Diogenes.

1980s

The perfume, here the paperback edition from 1994 (first edition 1985)

Alfred Andersch died on February 21, 1980 in Switzerland. Shortly after his death, his short story The Father of a Murderer , an acclaimed critical success and literary legacy appeared.

In 1982 a dispute broke out in the editing department, as a result of which the previous editor-in-chief Gerd Haffmans left the publishing house and founded his Haffmans publishing house . Three more editors were fired, and the publisher lost its reputation in the feature pages. In 1984, after a five-year absence, the publishing house took part in the Frankfurt Book Fair again. The focus was on the edition by George Orwell .

In 1985, Diogenes outsourced his distribution and founded the Buchdienst AG in Einsiedeln with Benziger Verlag , which over time took over distribution for 30 publishers and created additional jobs in rural Einsiedeln as the fourth largest distribution in German-speaking Switzerland. Twenty years later, the owners at the time merged with the second largest intermediate book retailer in Switzerland, the Zugerische Verlagsausgabe Balmer (90 publishers) to form Balmer Bücherdienst AG .

In 1985 Diogenes Verlag landed a world best-seller with Patrick Süskind's novel Das Parfum , which became the best-selling book in the entire history of the publishing company. Diogenes also took over the world rights from Friedrich Dürrenmatt. The non-fiction book by Luciano De Crescenzo , The History of Greek Philosophy, proved to be an unexpected success . A year later, new authors such as Jakob Arjouni , Doris Dörrie and Bernhard Schlink joined them.

Andrzej Szczypiorski's novel Die Schöne Frau Seidenman was a success for the Polish writer in 1988, who also became known in German-speaking countries. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and a year later three representatives of the publishing house toured the new federal states. The Austrian cartoonist Manfred Deix published his first book with Diogenes.

1990s

The reader . Paperback from 1997

In 1990 Friedrich Dürrenmatt caused a scandal in Switzerland with his speech Switzerland - A Prison : Dürrenmatt compared Switzerland with a prison in Europe at the Gottlieb Duttweiler award ceremony for Václav Havel . The following year Diogenes was named Publisher of the Year.

Donna Leon wrote her first Brunetti crime novel in 1993 . In 1994 the work by Joachim Ringelnatz was published by Diogenes. The renovation of the publishing house began in 1995, in the same year Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink appeared, a great success, especially since it was the first German-language novel to make it onto the New York Times bestseller lists . Patricia Highsmith died, shortly after her death Small g - a summer idyll was published.

Another big bestseller followed in 1996 with Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist .

Til today

In 2000, Diogenes put its first website on the Internet , and it was relaunched in June 2008. In 2002 the publisher celebrated its 50th anniversary. A successful 12-volume anniversary edition was published with works by Bernhard Schlink, Patricia Highsmith and John Irving .

Between 2008 and 2009, Diogenes published a new Maigret complete edition in 75 volumes, which followed from 2010 on an edition of 50 selected non-Maigret novels by Georges Simenon . In 2015 Tanja Graf worked for the publisher for a short time. Ursula Bergenthal took over the newly created position of chief editor in April 2017 .

In August 2017 it became known that after almost 40 years the publisher had lost the rights to the complete works of Georges Simenon in the German-speaking area to Kampa Verlag .

Publishing program

The publisher's focus is on fiction . Not only contemporary authors are published, but also classics of world literature such as Lao-Tse and Marcus Aurelius .

There are also children's books , cartoon volumes , the so-called library for life artists (books by Loriot or Reinhart Lempp appear , some with drawings). There are also house books, mostly large-format books that contain , for example, collections of fairy tales . Another feature of the house books are the multicolored illustrations. The large songbook , illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, also appears in this series.

This was followed by the small paperbacks , or minis for short , initially only intended as promotional gifts for booksellers in the 1970s, later as an independent series in different combinations. The series was discontinued in 2005 as "too unprofitable" despite its success. The variety of books published was extremely extensive, with religious texts ( The Sermon on the Mount. Current texts from the New Testament ), collections of poetry ( The most beautiful poems by Bertolt Brecht ), philosophical food for thought ( Albert Camus , Neither victim nor executioner. On a new world order ) , Letters and correspondence ( Georges Simenon , letter to my mother or Albert Einstein / Sigmund Freud Why War? ) As well as texts from oriental culture ( Zen , words of great masters , Krishnamurti , meditation ).

Cover design

The uniform cover layout makes the Diogenes books unmistakable: a thin black frame with rounded corners on a white background encompasses a cover picture above, including the name of the author, the title of the book and the publisher's name. This design has been in use since 1985, with the standardized Didot font since 1990 . In the same year it was decided to place the cover pictures all within the frame in future. The cover color white was originally predicted to be a failure , today it is trendy.

There were also other cover designs. From 1974 the paperback editions of the crime novels were initially in black and yellow. From 1990 the publisher gradually switched the detective novels to the now common white with a black frame.

Authors

Well-known authors who have been published by Diogenes Verlag are: Joan Aiken , Margery Allingham , Eric Ambler , Alfred Andersch , Jakob Arjouni , Honoré de Balzac , Ray Bradbury , Rainer Brambach , Gwendoline Butler , Anton Čechov , Raymond Chandler , Paulo Coelho , Andrea De Carlo , Charles De Coster , Luciano De Crescenzo , Charles Dickens , Philippe Djian , Rolf Dobelli , Doris Dörrie , Jessica Durlacher , Friedrich Dürrenmatt , William Faulkner , Federico Fellini , Anne Fine , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gustave Flaubert , Dick Francis , Celia Fremlin , Friedrich Glauser , Nikolai Wassiljewitsch Gogol , René Goscinny , Jeremias Gotthelf , Arnon Grünberg , Robert van Gulik , Erich Hackl , Dashiell Hammett , Patricia Highsmith , John Irving , Otto Jägersberg , Janosch , Gottfried Keller , Hans Werner Kettenbach , Andrei Kurkow , Hartmut Lange , DH Lawrence , Donna Leon , Hugo Loetscher , Loriot , Annalena McAfee , Carson McCullers , Matthias Matussek , Ross Macdonald , Ian McEwan , Ludwig M arcuse , W. Somerset Maugham , Margaret Millar , Molière , Brian Moore , Sibylle Mulot , Magdalen Nabb , Friedrich Nietzsche , Walter Nigg , Ingrid Noll , Amélie Nothomb , Seán Ó Faoláin , George Orwell , Liaty Pisani , Christoph Poschenrieder , Laurens van der Post , Joachim Ringelnatz , Saki , Bernhard Schlink , Arthur Schopenhauer , Meir Shalev , Alan Sillitoe , Georges Simenon , Alexander Sinowjew , Henry Slesar , Muriel Spark , Jason Starr , Robert Louis Stevenson , Thomas Strittmatter , Patrick Süskind , Martin Suter , Andrzej Szczypiorski , Susanna Tamaro , Jim Thompson , Lew Nikolajewitsch Tolstoi , B. Traven , Mark Twain , Fred Uhlman , Tomi Ungerer , Jules Verne , Barbara Vine , Walter Vogt , Robert Walser , Valerie Wilson Wesley , Urs Widmer , Oscar Wilde , Leon de Winter , Cornell Woolrich and Banana Yoshimoto .

Illustrator

Since its first book, Diogenes Verlag has continuously emerged with carefully produced collections by international artists and cartoonists. The artists published by him include u. a .: Jean Bosc , Chaval , Paul Flora , Edward Gorey , Loriot , Luis Murschetz , Sempé , Roland Topor , Tomi Ungerer , FK Waechter and Reiner Zimnik . Some of them also illustrated other books by the publisher, especially anthologies, or provided cover drawings.

Philippe Fix and Maurice Sendak should be mentioned as children's book illustrators for the publisher .

literature

  • Daniel Kampa, Winfried Stephan (ed.): Diogenes. An illustrated publishing history with bibliography 1952–2002. Diogenes, Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-257-05600-1 .
  • Daniel Kampa, Armin C. Kälin (eds.): Diogenes authors album. Diogenes, Zurich 1996; New edition ibid. 2002, ISBN 3-257-22900-3 .
  • Daniel Kampa, Stephan Winfried: Two friends, one publisher. For Rudolf C. Bettschart and Daniel Keel on their 80th birthday on October 10, 2010, Diogenes, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-257-05618-1 .
  • 60 years of Diogenes. In: Diogenes Magazin. No. 11, autumn 2012, pp. 93-107.

Movie

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ We mourn our publisher Daniel Keel. ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: diogenes.ch of September 13, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.diogenes.ch
  2. ↑ Roman Bucheli (rbl): Diogenes co-owner Rudolf C. Bettschart died - a publishing legend . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . April 1, 2015.
  3. ^ Diogenes Verlag: The Diogenes Verlag introduces itself. In: diogenes.ch. 2015, accessed October 9, 2016 .
  4. ^ Merger of Balmer and Bücherdienst AG. The publishing houses Balmer and Bücherdienst merge to form Balmer Bücherdienst AG. ( Memento from May 11, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) In: BücherDienst Einsiedeln (BDE) , April 19, 2004.
  5. ^ Andreas Platthaus : New triumvirate with Diogenes. In: FAZ . November 12, 2014, accessed April 11, 2017.
  6. ↑ Ursula Bergenthal becomes chief editor. In: Börsenblatt . Retrieved April 11, 2017.
  7. ↑ Diogenes loses rights to Simenon's complete works , boersenblatt.net, August 14, 2017, accessed on August 15, 2017
  8. ↑ Michael Schikowski: Shine and Melancholy - The Diogenes Book. Diogenes Verlag, February 16, 2015, accessed on August 14, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Oliver Georgi: Daniel and the lions' den. Rosemarie Pfluger portrays the Diogenes publishing house. In: literaturkritik.de , March 1, 2003.