Societas Bipontina

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Title page of a Societas Bipontina edition of the works of Ovid (1783), with engraving of Leukothea , by Johann Martin Weis

The Societas Bipontina was in 1778 in Two Bridges (lat. Bipontum ) was established and to 1794 in Two Bridges, then until 1811 in Strasbourg (lat. Argentoratum ) active publisher of works of ancient Greek and Latin authors.

Founder the most were Zweibrücker school make philologist Friedrich Christian Exter (* 1746 Kapellen-Drusweiler , † 1817 Mannheim ) and Johann Valentin Embser (* 1749 Woerth an der Sauer -Bruchmühle; † 1783 Two bridges). They gained Embser's father-in-law Georg Christian Crollius (* 1728 Zweibrücken; † 1790 ibid.), A historian with an excellent reputation, to work for them.

The delivery took place via a subscription offer from the publisher, which undertook to supply subscribers with a volume of 368 pages per month for an advance payment of seven chunks . Missing or additional sheets should be accounted for or added to. In 1783 the number of subscribers was 889, the number of subscribed copies about 1350. Between 1779 and 1811 the Societas Bipontina published a total of 215 volumes in (large) octave format as a series in the same design with legible writing and error-free typesetting (so-called . Editiones Bipontinae ). Of these, 152 were classical Latin and 63 classical Greek authors. The engravers of the title vignettes were Egid Verhelst (the Younger) and Johann Martin Weis the Younger (1738–1807).

From 1780 the publishing house worked with its own printing house in Zweibrücken, the Typographia Societatis Bipontinae , in which a font by the influential Parisian typographer Pierre Simon Fournier was used. Book production was interrupted in the years 1795 to 1797 after Zweibrücken was occupied by the French revolutionary army in 1793 and the printing works of the Societas Bipontina were plundered. From 1798, Exter let the publishing house in Strasbourg revive. When Friedrich Christian Exter withdrew into private life in 1811, the more than 30 years of publishing activities of Societas Bipontina ended.

Purpose and meaning

The aim of the Societas Bipontina was to compile a text version from existing and recognized editions of ancient classics that corresponded to the best available templates and was as error-free as possible. Accordingly, many editions contained the additions Ad optimas editiones collata ( Compiled from the best editions) and Editio accurata (Exact edition). In fact, the goal of a critical philological revision was only pursued with some degree of consistency in the beginning. From 1781, pure reprints of established older editions predominated.

Thus the majority of the Bipontiner prints did not offer any philologically independent editions by ancient authors. The high degree of reliability and the wide availability of the Bipontiner editions made them a sought-after tool for schoolchildren, students and classical scholars well into the 19th century.

A comprehensive collection of the Editiones Bipontinae is kept in the Zweibrücken Bibliotheca Bipontina .

The classic editions of the Societas Bipontina are still valued today by lovers and collectors of old books ( bibliophilia ). The special quality of the printed image, the paper and the cover also contribute to this.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Peter Fuchs:  Exter, Friedrich Christian. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 4, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1959, ISBN 3-428-00185-0 , p. 704 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ rambow.de
  3. ↑ Schöndorf: Zweibrücker book printing for the princely period 1488–1794. 1995, p. 174.
  4. ^ Burkard: Bibliography of the Editiones Bipontinae. 1990, p. 251.
  5. ^ Burkard: Bibliography of the Editiones Bipontinae. 1990, p. 9.