Gottfried Vollmer (publisher)

Diedrich Gottfried Leberecht Vollmer (* 1768 in Thorn ; † April 30, 1815 in Hamburg ) was a German publisher and bookseller .

Live and act

Gottfried Vollmer, whose father worked as a preacher, completed a commercial training in Danzig in 1789 . He then opened a bookstore in his hometown. In 1793 he published a translation of Robespierre's speech , which he had given on November 17, 1793. The version came from Georg Friedrich Rebmann . Vollmer and Rebmann jointly opened a publishing bookstore in Dessau . Since Rebmann was expelled from the city in 1794, both went to Erfurt , where Vollmer published Rebmann's political magazine "Das Neue Graue Ungeheuer" in the same year and in 1796 had to serve a prison sentence of several weeks for this.

At the beginning of 1796 Vollmer moved to Altona , where the Altonaer Verlagsgesellschaft headed by Friedrich Bechtold , whose privilege Vollmer had held since July 24, 1794, was located. In 1798 the company opened a bookstore in Hamburg. Another bookstore was in Mainz , where Vollmer moved in 1798. In March 1799 he founded a reading community in Altona, in which he did not participate for long.

On March 15, 1799 Vollmer acquired Hamburg citizenship and a little later the citizenship in Mainz. Joachim Lorenz Evers and Heinrich Gottlieb Schmieder ran the publishing company in Altona during Vollmer's stay in Mainz. By the time the Danish censorship laws came into effect on November 1, 1799, the society published more democratic works than any other German publishing house. For the Company wrote Frederick Joseph Emerich , Johann Georg Kerner , Friedrich Christian Laukhard , Andreas Riem , Friedrich Wilhelm von Schütz and Heinrich Würzer . Due to the censorship by the Danes, the publisher had problems in the following period to publish more liberal works.

Vollmer invested in the Altona National Theater in 1800 and moved to Hamburg in 1804. Here he lived at Grosse Reichenstrasse  47 and later moved to house number 97. He named the publishing house after himself. In 1805 he published Immanuel Kant's "Physical Geography" . The work not authorized by Kant was based on a transcript of Kant's lectures that Vollmer's brother Johann Jakob Wilhelm had created. More than 30 medical advisors, Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrechts , with whom Vollmer maintained friendly contacts, proved to be particularly successful in the publishing business . Albrecht also made “wound water”, which Vollmer offered in his bookstore.

Gottfried Vollmer, who was married to Augusta Sophia Catharina, née Fischer, died in Hamburg at the end of April 1815. Johann Gottlieb Herold continued to run Vollmer's business as a Herold bookstore .

literature

• Hans-Werner Engels : Vollmer, Gottfried . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 4 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0229-7 , pp. 361 .