Que sais-je?
Que sais-je? (in German: What do I know? ) is an edition series of the Presses Universitaires de France , which was founded in 1941 by Paul Angoulvent . The series brings together non-fiction books that deal with the essentials of a subject in pocket book format on 128 pages. The equipment of the cover is kept spartan in the standard design and illustrations are largely dispensed with. This makes a small sales price possible.
Explanation of the series title
The title of the series goes back to a famous sentence in the essays by Michel de Montaigne on the modest extent of human knowledge, considering the infinite extent of the subject of knowledge and the straight thread of the humanistic approach of the Renaissance to this knowledge.
Other publishers have launched similar series, such as "Repères" at La Découverte or "Clefs" at Montchrestien .
Presentation
The series comprises more than 4,000 titles in the current catalog and thus represents in its entirety a large encyclopedia that covers all areas of human knowledge, as far as they are topics at universities or in popular culture .
Individual volumes in the series have been translated into 43 languages. In Germany, the Hamburg publishing house Johannes Maria Hoeppner founded the Was ich know? Series in 1957 . as encyclopedia of the XX. Century . By 1960, 20 volumes translated from the French series had been published. The 30 other volumes that had been announced did not come to print. The total print run in French is more than 160 million copies (as of 2004). Today it is one of the largest stores of knowledge in the world, the volumes of which were written by experts in their discipline for the general public.
The individual ribbons are updated with each new edition and are withdrawn from the catalog when they are out of date.
See also
Web links
- Que sais-je? on the Presses Universitaires de France website