The Tale of Mohr and the Siebecks
Once upon a time there lived a man, who ran a bookshop in Frankfurt am Main. He ran it so well that the re-establishers of the University of Heidelberg could not help but take notice. So they invited him to settle there to ensure that a competent bookseller was close at hand. He accepted this invitation, starting with a branch of the store and then later with the headquarters. This bookseller went by the name of Jacob Christian Benjamin Mohr, by which he traded in Frankfurt from 1801 onwards and in Heidelberg from 1804 onwards.
Since his tasks in Heidelberg were so demanding, he took on Zimmer, an enterprising theologian, as his partner and under the name of Mohr und Zimmer he published well known writings of the ›Heidelberg Romantics‹ such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn with its cover picture of a cornucopia or a little postillion boldly swinging his horn above his head. This later repeatedly appeared as the trademark of the publishing house. Soon Zimmer sought out distant climbs while Mohr focused on scholarly pursuits and published monographs as well as one of the first academic journals, Archiv für die civilistische Praxis.
In doing so Mohr became widely known beyond the borders of Heidelberg and left an important book business behind him, consisting of the bookshop, the publishing house and the printing house as the business divisions. His sons continued the trade initially, but after a few years had passed, they sold the bookshop to the bookseller Koester who continued it in Heidelberg, and subseqently the publishing house to Paul Siebeck, the university bookseller and publisher in Tübingen. Taking wih him some of the titles of his paternal publishing house, the H. Laupp’sche Buchhandlung, he set off for Freiburg im Breisgau where the new Imperial provinces of the day, Alsace und Lothringen, lay before him as a fresh market. He named his business Akademische Verlagsbuchhandlung von J. C. B. Mohr, Inhaber Paul Siebeck, which he very soon abbreviated to J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) in keeping with the time.
Siebeck was now known beyond the realm of Freiburg and in recognition of his service the lord of Baden awarded the order of the Zähringer lion to him. He quickly adapted it to represent his own heraldic animal brandishing a great flag with artibus ingenuis as its motto. This is Latin for ›to the noble arts‹ meaning ›to the sciences‹: thus he wanted to dedicate his life to serving the sciences with the courage of a lion. By doing so he reaped no small success and he further pursued this goal after the publishing house had been relocated to his home town Tübingen and merged with his paternal business.
The motto and the name remained unchanged when his son, and subsequently his grandson and great grandson took charge of the publishing house. The lion alone was cut slightly more angularly from wood in 1927 and since the result was so dominant, the lion started to outstage the name on the book covers.
The time came however, when drawings were called pictograms and flooded the world. At the same time it became increasingly difficult for non-German readers and authors to correctly cite the publishing house with its complicated name. So it came about that Siebeck’s great-grandchild shortened the name once again to suit daily usage in the house’s 195th year. Whilst the first names and punctuation marks were dispensible, neither Mohr nor Siebeck should be absent. And so, it came to pass that Mohr Siebeck took its place upon the books and just as both these names have stood the test of time, so they stand it no less today.
Georg Siebeck
[Written for the Mohr Kurier 1996/2 in May 1996 and adapted for the Gesamtkatalog 1996/97 in July 1996; translated by Camilla Reece-Trapp in April 2009]