Philipp Erasmus Reich

Philipp Erasmus Reich; Portrait by Anton Graff , 1774.

Philipp Erasmus Reich (born December 1, 1717 in Laubach in der Wetterau , † December 3, 1787 in Leipzig ) was a German bookseller and publisher .

Youth and years of apprenticeship

Philipp Erasmus Reich was born on December 1, 1717 in Laubach in the county of Solms-Wetterau / Hessen. His grandfather was a Protestant pastor and his father, Johann Jakob Reich, was a doctor of medicine who produced the medicines necessary for his profession himself. After Philipp Erasmus Reich's mother, Margarethe Louise Reich, died in 1719, his father Johann Jakob Reich married the merchant's daughter Marie Magdalena Martini in 1720. Reich attended school from the age of five and grew up in a "climate of religious tolerance, pronounced bourgeois self-confidence and a focus on modern, precise natural sciences such as medicine and pharmacy", in which he therefore "received decisive suggestions from his father". The Reichsgraf von Solms-Laubach, as an important book lover, also seems to have had a significant influence on Reich and his contact with the book medium, as his library had over 60,000 volumes, which Reich's father, the medical empire, could also have accessed.

From 1732 to 1744 Reich completed an apprenticeship in bookselling with Johann Benjamin Andreae the Elder. Ä. (1705–1778) in Frankfurt am Main . Its publisher , Andreae & Hort, enjoyed a relatively significant reputation at the time, as it mainly sold literature with a focus on law , history and theology and partly printed it himself. After Reich had successfully completed his apprenticeship and already in Stockholm for the local one Branch of the Weidmann bookstore , with which his Frankfurt teacher had family connections, he finally moved to Leipzig in 1744/45 and initially took on a job as a servant at the Weidmann bookstore. In later years, in 1775, he married Friederike Louise Heyl and in 1776 bought a small castle in Sellerhausen near Leipzig, where he kept a well-known and much-visited salon in the following summers.

Work in the Weidmann bookstore

After becoming managing director , Reich increasingly made contacts with new, young authors who had not yet established themselves as authors. Some of the most influential authors of this era, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert , Christoph Martin Wieland , Johann Georg Sulzer , Christian Felix Weisse and Johann Kaspar Lavater , had their works published by Weidmann and Reich. The French grammar revised by Claude Buffier by Robert Jean DesPepliers ( Nouvelle Et Parfaite Grammaire Royale Françoise Et Allemande ) was particularly profitable . From these contacts, relationships of trust developed in part, which were based on far more than just common economic interests. Old stocks of the Weidmann bookstore were dissolved or sold. In just a few years, Reich created a small but important group of employees, consultants and confidants around him, to whom he gave an astonishing amount of say in publishing and book trade matters at that time, which later became the name of the publisher as a “publisher of the authors ”explains. He himself, however, increasingly limited himself to the technical and organizational area by taking care of the print and paper quality, the equipment of the publishing products and their sales and advertising and continued to work as a commission agent for external publishers.

The most important British author whom Reich signed for the German market was Samuel Richardson , who achieved international renown through his works "Geschichte Herr Carl Grandison" and "Pamela", which is regarded as the first epistolary novel in literary history, and made Reich the most important importer English and later also Italian literature. The relationship with Richardson was so close that Reich visited him in England for a longer period in 1756 and even lived with Richardson's family in their house.

Another milestone in the kingdom publishing activity can be used to Autumn Fair will be set in 1759, as Reich the pressure of the "Catalogus Universalis", the Leipziger Term Catalog , let take by the Weidmannsche publishing. This semi-annual directory of all books published in the German-speaking area, which was first published by Henning Große (1553–1621) in 1585, was the most important bookseller information tool of that time and was immediately restructured by Reich. The takeover of this supraregional and influential work gave Reich a position on the German book market that made many booksellers and publishers dependent on him, as they wanted to see their publications recorded in this work. During the period in which Reich was the managing director of the Weidmann bookstore and, from 1762, also a partner, around 1,600 works were published by “Weidmanns Erben und Reich”, making it one of the largest German book publishers of its time.

Reformer of the German book market

He reformed the German book trade in the 18th century by against self-publishing and piracy fought by 1764 as leader of a group of German booksellers visiting the by then 250 years in Frankfurt held Book Fair aufkündigte and only at the Book Fair in Leipzig his works presented and by the place of the hitherto prevailing barter the Barverkehr introduced. In support of his measures, he brought together more than 50 companies in 1765 in a "bookstore company", which was not, however, the forerunner of the German Booksellers Association founded in 1825 .

The cancellation of the Frankfurt Book Fair

In the 18th century, book fairs were held several times a year in both Frankfurt and Leipzig, at which the individual publishers presented their latest works and offered them for exchange. Both locations, however, increasingly differed in their offerings, since mainly Latin works and reprints from the north German publishers were exchanged in Frankfurt, making Leipzig more and more prominent as a location for German-language and more contemporary works. These differences made the Frankfurter Messe more and more unattractive for the Leipzig publishers in addition to the equally important factor of the temporal overlap with the Leipziger Messe. The works of the North German publishers were also hindered in their distribution by the Imperial Book Commission in Frankfurt, as they often dealt with Reformation-religious content. In 1764 , twelve publishers from Leipzig decided to stay away from the Frankfurt Book Fair from now on under the leadership of Philipp Erasmus Reich.

Introduction of net trading

At the Easter fair in 1760, Reich announced that a new payment method would come into effect. This new type of action, the so-called net trade , was based on decisive changes compared to the barter trade previously common in Germany . From now on, all Weidmann's publishing works were to be paid for in cash, there was no longer any right to return these works to the publisher and only a small discount of 15% was granted for the buying booksellers. Reich cited the quality of his products as reasons, the general price and tax increases caused by the Prussian occupation of Leipzig from 1756 to 1763 , and the changed sales opportunities. This change from change to net trading was the final transition from barter to money economy on the German book market. This reform had a decisive influence on the emergence of capitalist competitive thinking in the book market sector in the years that followed and also led to the separation of the publisher and product range .

Struggle against reprint and self-publishing

After Reich had turned his back on the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1764 , he and a group of other booksellers wrote a letter to the Elector of Saxony asking for the "security of our own businesses" to be strengthened. In their opinion, the existing privileges were no longer sufficient and needed revision to secure the business and investments of the Saxon publishers. They therefore called for generally applicable publishing law legislation, a forerunner of today's copyright law , so to speak .

After Klopstock had advocated the emancipation of writers from publishers and booksellers by self-publishing in his paper Die deutsche Gelehrten Republik in 1774 , Reich presented his views on these questions in two anonymously published writings: Accidental thoughts of a bookseller about Mr. Klopstock's advertisement of a learned republic (1773) and Der Bücher-Verlag determined more precisely in all intentions. To the author of the books-publishing house considering the writers, the booksellers and the public considered (1773).

See also

• Hanauer book cover
• Pirated printing
• Reich bookseller

credentials

1. ^ Mark Lehmstedt : Philipp Erasmus Reich and the Frankfurt Book Fair . FAZ.NET , April 18, 2014
2. ^ Mark Lehmstedt: Philipp Erasmus Reich (1717 - 1787), publisher of the Enlightenment and reformer of the German book trade. P. 78.

literature

• Karl Buchner: Wieland and the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung: On the history of German literature and the German book trade . Weidmann, Berlin 1871.
• Erich Jauernig (Ed.): 250 years of Weidmann's bookstore . In: Monthly for secondary schools . Supplement / issue 4, Berlin 1930.
• Helmut Kiesel and Paul Münch: Society and literature in the 18th century. Requirements and formation of the literary market in Germany . Beck, Munich 1977.
• Hazel Rosenstrauch : Book trade manufacture and education. The reforms of the bookseller and publisher Ph. E. Reich (1717–1787). Social historical study on the development of the literary market . First published in Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 26, 1st half volume, 1985, pp. 1–129. Also as a special edition, Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändlervereinigung 1986, ISBN 3-7657-1340-6 .
• Mark Lehmstedt : Philipp Erasmus Reich (1717–1787), publisher of the Enlightenment and reformer of the German book trade . Exhibition catalog, Leipzig 1989.
• Mark Lehmstedt: Structure and working method of a publisher of the German Enlightenment. The Weidmannsche Buchhandlung in Leipzig under the direction of Philipp Erasmus Reich between 1745 and 1787 . Dissertation University of Leipzig, Leipzig 1990.
• Gerhard Kurtze: Philipp Erasmus Reich. Nation's first bookseller . In: Vera Hauschild (Hrsg.): The great Leipzig: 26 approaches . Insel Verlag, Frankfurt / Main & Leipzig 1996, pp. 144–154.
• Volker Title:  Reich, Philipp Erasmus. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 289 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Literature by and about Philipp Erasmus Reich in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jennifer Willenberg: Philipp Erasmus Reich (1717–1787) . In: Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (Ed.): Saxon Biography .