Engelhard Benjamin Schwickert

Johann Friedrich Fischer: Platonis Eutyphro Apologia Socratis Crito Phaedo , published in Leipzig 1783

Engelhard Benjamin Schwickert (born January 31, 1741 in Zellerfeld , † January 10, 1825 in Leipzig , other spellings also: Engelhardt Beniamin or Latinized Schwickerti or Suikertus ) was one of the most influential German publishers of his time. In 1769 he founded the EB Schwickert publishing house , which was one of the leading publishers in German-speaking countries until the end of the 19th century and had numerous authors and composers under contract. In the early years, Schwickert was noticed by unfair business methods (repeated reprints by other publishers without a license), but soon turned into a reputable publishing company.

Coming from a humble background, he joined the Leipzig bookstore Dyck in 1762 as a shop clerk. From around 1766 he began, as a supposed publishing representative of fictional companies such as Dodsley & Compagnie von London and J. Dodsley and Caspar Moser - named without permission after the London publisher Robert Dodsley (1703–1764) - a lively correspondence with authors and other bookshops. From 1767 he began to produce pirated prints under the same companies ( Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg's Hypochondrist was one of the first ) and thereby collected capital and experience (also at the expense of the traditional bookstore Dyck). In 1769 he received permission to operate a printing press .

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is one of the best-known authors published by Schwickert , including the 2nd edition of his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1769). After receiving part of the manuscript, Schwickert had already announced 104 chapters to the book trade, although the author had only planned 100 chapters. Lessing then added 4 chapters that dealt with the problems of unfair publishing and unauthorized reprinting (and actually did not belong to the topic). In response to this, Schwickert added a corresponding comment from the publisher to the first edition .

Also in 1769 he published his Almanac of the German Muses for the year 1770 , with which he succeeded in the special coup of anticipating the Göttingen Muses Almanac planned by Dieterich for 1770 and using this opportunity to preprint 19 poems from the competition almanac (illegally) in his own. Schwickert published the Almanac of the German Muses (AdM) until 1775, from 1776 under the title Leipziger Musen-Almanach , of which he also served as its editor from 1782.

Schwickert's special talent - and the key to success - lay in not only seeing a small, academically educated audience as a buyer of his books, as in the times of absolutism , but foreseeing the spirit of the Enlightenment with its emerging broad bourgeoisie . As a result, there was suddenly a large market for classical literature that he was the first to serve, several years before the established publishers became aware of this new clientele.

literature

• Obituary. In: Friedrich A. Schmidt (Ed.): New Nekrolog der Deutschen , Vol. 3 (1825). Book 2, pp. 1276-1278. See GBS

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Reinhard Wittmann: On the publisher typology of the Goethe era (Yearbook for International German Studies. Vol. VIII, H.1, 1976, pp. 99–130 .; PDF; 478 kB)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Joachim Ehrhardt: Name register on the correspondence between citizen and Heinrich Christian Boie  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ "Nachspiel" Lessing and subsequent "Intermezzo" from "J. Dodsley & Compagnie ” in the Hamburg Dramaturgy from 1769 (GBS).