The Memory of a Publishing House
Mohr Siebeck has just donated its archives to the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz (state library) in Berlin. What was it that induced us to make this move?
A short observation to begin with: A publishing company is a strange institution. Its purpose is to continually present something new. This holds especially for academic publishing. The authors as the originators of this continual newness and also the purchasers of this, in our case the researchers, the students and the libraries who serve them, trust the company to do so particularly if it has a long tradition.
Such a tradition is often claimed by showing a far distant date of foundation. It can however only be effective it there is a continuity either in the persons acting on behalf of the company or in the consistent maxims of their actions or at least in the consistent recording of these actions.
When we look back to 1801, the year in which the Mohr Verlag was founded, we see how it started with Jakob Christian Benjamin Mohr, whose academic publishing house and bookstore in Heidelberg attained considerable importance, together with the university, but the continuity to him exists at best in the what: Then as now the main focus was on the publication of books by and for academics. How this was done at that time - and to me this seems to be the pivotal issue in a publishing tradition - not much is known about this. Mohr’s sons sold the publishing company in 1878 to the Siebecks in Tübingen and did not provide them with many records. There are only some records made by the H. Lauppsche Buchhandlung, founded in Tübingen in 1816, which was the purchasing company.
Thus our company’s memory of how we dealt with which authors, advisors and important business partners “only” goes back 194 or 132 years. Nevertheless I have always regarded it as a special treasure. I was impressed at first sight by the distinguished names of which there is an abundance, such as Adolf von Harnack, Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, Friedrich August von Hayek and Albert Schweitzer, to name just a few. At second sight, reading letters written during the same period made me aware of the network which the publishers at that time had established to transcend borders and subjects in order to obtain what they felt were the best manuscripts.
For those of us acting today, these archives are above all a very special treasure because they contain a great deal of internal information as well. Among these are the staff lists, which tell us who worked for the publishing company and when. There are also the cost accounting books, which reveal the expectations placed on publishing at that time. Then there are the clippings of the reviews, reflecting the echoes of the scholarly colleagues, the index cards with the sales figures, which show the relentless adjustment of the expectations, and the internal correspondence, showing the communication between those acting on behalf of the company when they were in different places.
All of this has been preserved as what the historians call an “undisturbed record”, without any appreciable gaps from the 19th century up to the present time. The conversations I have had with many people who have done research using these records, the reading of their books and of many of the documents quoted in them have revealed more to me about our tradition than my father could ever tell me. I decided to part with this treasure, guarded for such a long time, because I think that those of us working at the publishing company today can learn even more for our own actions if the actions of our predecessors are studied even more and are retold. An important prerequisite for this is the indexing of these archives by true experts; there has to be a “treasure map” for this, and the Staatsbibliothek has promised to create one. Thus half of the opening question has been answered.
It is the existence of this treasure which we owe to the scholars who participated in the creation of this enormous letters corpus, not only in order to publish their own works but also to help establish a network for their discipline, for their current and future colleagues, a network which would carry their works beyond their immediate sphere of influence out into the world. It is the preservation of it which we owe to the good luck that Tübingen had in being spared bombing during the war. Thus I regard this treasure as a gift given by academia and by history. This is why I don’t want to sell it, but decided to give it back to academia and the exploration of its history. This is the second half of the answer to the question.
Since the actions of a publisher are always speculative as well, I would like to close with a speculation: Perhaps as a result of studying our archives publishers will no longer be regarded merely as parasites of academia, an attitude which is fashionable in many places today. Perhaps people will realize that our predecessors, in spite of all their faults, were helpful companions to academia, who used criteria which differed from those of a local faculty, of a national research community or even those of the Zeitgeist to detect those scholarly findings which they surmised would be worthy of dissemination in other places and times as well.
Anyone who thinks he or she could do this better or less expensively or even both, is welcome to start proving it now!
Georg Siebeck
[Written for the Mohr Kurier 2010/2 in May 2010; translated by Jill Sopper in June 2010.]