Williams & Co.
Williams & Co. was a German book publisher.
history
In 1924 Edith Jacobsohn , b. Schiffer, - together with Edith Weinreich-Williams and Annie Williams, b. Ball, - Verlag Williams & Co. The two co-founders left in the first year. Edith Jacobsohn ran the publishing house together with her husband Siegfried Jacobsohn , editor of the weekly magazine Weltbühne , formerly Schaubühne .
The publishing house developed into a successful children's and youth book publisher. This contributed to the fact that the publisher received the German-language rights to Hugh Lofting's children 's book The Story of Doctor Dolittle in 1925 . The book was published in 1926 by Williams Verlag as Doctor Dolittle and his Animals . In addition, the publisher received the rights to Alan Alexander Milne's book Winnie-the-Pooh , which appeared in 1927 as Pooh Bear .
Edith Jacobsohn had the writer Erich Kästner - one of the Weltbühne authors - write children's books. In 1929 the successful title Emil and the Detectives appeared . The publishing program also included PL Travers with Mary Poppins .
Two yearbooks, Jugend und Welt , were published in 1927 and 1928 , documenting the close ties between the Williams publishing house and the Weltbühne and its authors, namely Bertolt Brecht , Carl von Ossietzky , Kurt Tucholsky , Else Lasker-Schüler and Richard Hülsenbeck .
In 1933 Edith Jacobsohn had to emigrate to England via Vienna and Switzerland. She left the management of the company to her colleague Cecilie Dressler. In the same year Kurt Leo Maschler , at that time already the owner of several publishers, bought the Williams & Co. publishing house. Two years later he also founded Atrium Verlag in Basel so that Erich Kästner, whose texts were now banned in Germany, could continue to publish his books. Maschler transferred almost all the rights of the Williams publishing house to the Atrium publishing house in Switzerland in order to protect them from the National Socialists.
In 1936, Cecile Dressler acquired shares in the publishing house from Maschler, which now operated for a few years under the name Williams-Verlag, owner Cecilie Dressler . In 1941 the name was changed to Cecilie Dressler Verlag . After the Second World War , Cecilie Dressler became the owner of the publishing house, which was taken over by the Friedrich Oetinger publishing group in 1971 .
literature
- Frank Flechtmann: My beautiful publishing house, Williams & Co. Memory of Edith Jacobsohn; about a forgotten publisher of famous books; with a bibliography 1925 - 1955. Omnis Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-933175-19-9 . (Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Mein Schöner Verlag, Williams & Co. Edith Jacobsohn and Williams & Co. Verlag. History and success of a Berlin publishing house from the twenties" in the Theodor Fontane Library, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, December 4th 1997 to January 30, 1998)
- Improved text version of the exhibition brochure by Frank Flechtmann, Berlin 2012, here. [1]
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Theodor Brüggemann: Der Williams-Verlag (1926-1954) , under alliteratus.com . Retrieved November 10, 2009.
- ^ Judith Claudia Joos: Trustees for the public? Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-447-05744-8 , p. 148/149 ( google.de [accessed on March 15, 2019]).