Gustav Kühn (printer)

Kühn memorial on the Neuruppin school square

Adolph Gustav Leopold Kühn (born September 21, 1794 in Neuruppin ; † August 29, 1868 there ) was a German printer , publisher and editor of Bilderbogen .

history

ancestors

The Kühn family was already resident in Brandenburg in 1470 and in Neuruppin from 1699. Johann Matthias Kühn ran a bookbinding workshop here , which he passed on to his son Johann Christian. Business was bad and so the son Johann Bernhard Kühn (1750–1826) could not attend the recommended university. Instead he became a bookbinder journeyman and from 1770 went on wanderings to Leipzig , Heilbronn and Strasbourg . The wood and metal cutting skills he learned and his own artistic talent clearly stood out from his father's skills. Therefore, after completing his master's degree, he opened his own workshop in 1775 in his hometown. Here he founded a well-known lending library , operated an electric machine and a large peep box . However, his house fell victim to the city fire of 1787 and so he moved into a new building at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Straße 62. There, in addition to the bookbinding and lending library, he set up a bookstore and, from 1791, a printer with royal privilege. His repertoire included Kolporta writings, religious edification books, novels he wrote himself and around 1810 the first picture sheets, which were only available in the shop in Neuruppin. Johann Bernhard was married to Sabina Regina Fretzdorf. On May 1, 1815, due to illness, Johann Bernhard transferred the business of the company with 18 employees to their son, Adolph Gustav Leopold, and his son Karl became a book and paper dealer in Berlin .

Adolph Gustav Leopold Kühn

Memorial plaque on the site of the former old cemetery where Kühn was buried

Before Gustav Kühn took over his father's business, he studied wood , steel and copper engraving at the Berlin Art Academy from January 1812 until it was closed in spring 1813 . Prof. Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz (1786–1870) was among his teachers . In the years 1814–1819 he gave drawing lessons at the Neuruppiner Gymnasium, joined his father's company as a partner in 1819 and took over it in 1822. As early as 1825 he introduced the commercial lithography process , earlier than, for example, Berlin printers. He called himself “purveyor to the court” and his brother became the company's commission dealer. Under the direction of Gustav Kühn, who drew and wrote the sheets, the mostly hand-colored Neuruppiner picture sheets achieved worldwide distribution. They are considered the forerunners of the illustrated newspaper. From 1828 he also published the Ruppiner Zeitung , the forerunner of the Märkische Zeitung . As early as 1830 the printing company owned 1000 printing stones and a print run of 600,000 sheets, in 1832 production was 1.2 million sheets, the first factory building was built in 1840, ten years later 60 colorists worked for the company, including one of the professional stone draftsmen the Berlin court painter Bülow. Machine lithopresses were used from 1858, the note steam high-speed press printing can be found u. a. 1865. The outstanding quality of the Hebrew picture sheets is remarkable . In the years 1865 and 1866, 30 sheets are listed under the heading "Holy Images", which were provided with captions in the Jewish language . The range of topics was just as varied as that of Christian topics, the flawless typeface suggests that the publishers resorted to Steinschneider who either spoke the language or were given very good templates.

progeny

After Gustav Kühn's death, his son, the Geheime Kommerzienrat Bernhard Kühn, took over the factory; Bernhard, Paul (* 1848) and Richard (1850–1899) sons sold the lithographic company and the Bilderbogenverlag to Otto Meusel and Richard Gumbrecht ( 1864–1911), which produced under the name Kühn for a few years. From the publishing program of 1895 it is known that the picture sheets were published in numerous foreign languages, including Scandinavian languages , but also in Czech , Polish , Lithuanian , English , French and Spanish .

At the turn of the century, the printing of picture sheets fell sharply, Meusel and Gumbrecht acquired the Märkische Zeitung from Heinrich Morchel in 1904 , which he had acquired from the Kühns. The reunited company was run in the 1920s by Meusel's brother Oswald and his son-in-law Walther Engelbrecht, the history of the publishing house ended in 1939.

Reinhold Kühn, Gustav Kühn's second son, went to Berlin and founded the Reinhold Kühn publishing house there in 1853 . The publishing house existed until 1954 and then went bankrupt.

The printing house newly built by Gustav Kühn in Neuruppin is now part of the Bilderbogenpassage shopping center .

literature

• Erdmute Nieke: Religious picture sheets from Neuruppin. A study on piety in the 19th century , Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, Frankfurt (Main) 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57156-9 , pp. 23–26, pp. 162–170
• Hans Ries:  Kühn, Gustav. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 193 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Adolf Spamer, Mathilde Hain: The picture sheet from the "clerical house maid": a contribution to the history of the religious picture sheet and the edification literature in the popular publishing industry in Central Europe (= Volume 6 of the publications of the Philipps University of Marburg Institute for Central European Folk Research, A: General series) , O. Schwartz Verlag, 1970, pp. 201f