Everyday Life in the German Book Trade: Frederich Nicolai as Bookseller and Publisher in the Age of Enlightenment, 1750-1810

It has now been more than three decades since the publication of Horst Möller’s study of Friedrich Nicolai, a pioneering work that rescued the Berlin Aufklärer, bookseller and journal editor from the condescension of his contemporaries and the neglect of posterity.[1] Möller’s study challenged the caricature of Nicolai as arch philistine, intellectual simpleton, and mercenary Buchmacher fashioned by his many illustrious enemies—Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel—and paved the way for a reappraisal of Nicolai’s historical importance. Following the publication of Möller’s study, scholars have come to recognize Nicolai as one of the leading and most influential figures in the history of the German Enlightenment.

And yet Möller’s study gave short shrift to what was, arguably, Nicolai’s most important sphere of activity: his role as bookseller and publisher. It told only half the story—or perhaps less than half the story—of Nicolai’s life’s work, and introduced a somewhat artificial division between Nicolai’s ideas, to which it paid close attention, and his commercial activity, which it largely ignored. This division was artificial because Nicolai himself would certainly have repudiated it: for him, book-selling and publishing were not just a business but also a means of fostering Enlightenment.

Everyday Life in the German Booktrade by Pamela Selwyn overcomes this division and restores the unity to Nicolai’s life’s work. Drawing on the thousands of unpublished letters in Nicolai’s Nachlass in Berlin, Selwyn presents a richly-detailed account of Nicolai as bookseller and publisher. She depicts him at the helm of a vast business enterprise navigating the treacherous waters of the eighteenth-century book trade. She charts his movements, from his shop in Berlin to the book fairs in Leipzig. She shows him combating pirate publishers and steering manuscripts past censors, negotiating with authors, recruiting workers for his shop, and grappling with such practical problems as the high cost of paper and the sorry state of the printing industry in Prussia. Copies of Nicolai’s own letters have not survived, and neither have his account books. So Selwyn’s study cannot lay claim to being an exhaustive account of Nicolai’s business. But it is as exhaustive as it could have been given the limits of the documents; and it fills in many of the documentary holes through an imaginative work of historical reconstruction, which makes deft and intelligent use of the vast secondary literature in the field of book history. Whatever its unavoidable limits, therefore, it well deserves its title: it is an absorbing, lucid and thorough study of “everyday life in the German book trade.”

What is the portrait of Nicolai that emerges from Selwyn’s study? Nicolai was, as Selwyn says, a “trained” [gelernter], rather than a “scholarly” [gelehrter], bookseller. As a youth, he served an apprenticeship with a bookseller in Frankfurt an der Oder; then, on the death of his brother in 1758, he inherited the family bookshop in Berlin, which he directed without interruption until his own death in 1811. Because the demands of his career prevented him attending university, such education as Nicolai had was haphazard. He picked it up, little by little, along the road of life, through his own extensive reading of contemporary literature and through his conversations with such friends in Berlin as Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing. To Nicolai’s enemies, this lack of a systematic and rigorous scholarly education was a defect, and so disqualified him from participating in the great philosophic and literary debates of the age. But Nicolai did not regard it as a defect at all. In fact, he saw it as a virtue. In one of his earliest publications, Briefe über den itzigen Zustand der schönen Wissenschaften in Deutschland(1755), he denounced the pedantry of the German academic establishment, which he held responsible for the wide gap between authors and readers. His literary ideal was located in the leading countries of western Europe, in France and in England. There, he believed, authors wrote not just for one another but for a broad public; and throughout his career he bent his efforts to making Germany more like its western neighbors. His goal was to heal what he saw as the fateful rift at the heart of German literary life, to close the gap between contemporary German literature and its potential public.

As a bookseller and publisher in personal union, Nicolai was able to pursue this goal at both ends of the literary process, in his sale of books to the public on the one hand and in his production of new editions on the other. It is common to think of the bookseller/publisher as a mere middleman, a commercial intermediary who harmonizes supply and demand according to the laws of the marketplace. Such a view, however, does not begin to capture the role played by Nicolai. In his retail trade, he did not simply respond to demand, he shaped it. He deployed his influence to secure the adoption of his school books for use in local schools; he published book catalogues, lists of selected titles that were designed to orient readers bewildered by the rapid growth in the literary market during the last third of the eighteenth century; and some of his retail customers, especially those in remote locations far from Berlin, had so much confidence in his literary judgment that they gave him an all but free hand in the selection of their books. Because he maintained a far-flung retail trade, Nicolai had a keen sense of which titles would be most likely to sell. When it came to the production of his own editions, therefore, he did not confine himself to the manuscripts that authors submitted to him. Sometimes, as in the case of translations or school texts, the idea for a publication originated with him. He drew up the plans, then commissioned an author to execute them. And in such cases, he considered authors to be no more than tools for the realization of his own ideas. Hence his objections to a draft of the Prussian Landrecht that proposed to strengthen the proprietary rights of authors at the expense of publishers. Such a proposal was misconceived, Nicolai argued, because it failed to take account of the active and creative role that publishers played in the process of literary production.

As befitted his conception of literature and his analysis of the defects in German literary life, Nicolai strove to make his editions available to the widest possible public. Generally speaking, he had them printed in small formats and on plain paper, shunning typographical extravagance so as to reduce prices; and he favored popular genres at the expense of scholarly ones. Among the 420 new titles published by him, belles-lettres was the leading genre (15.2%), followed closely by theology. That theology would have counted as a popular genre may, at first sight, seem somewhat strange, especially to those students of the eighteenth century whose vision of Enlightenment literary culture is centered on France. In this regard, however, Germany was quite different from France. In Germany, theology was very much a popular genre, and Nicolai’s theological publications were all the more popular because he gave preference to collections of sermons and topical works on contemporary controversies rather than the weighty tomes of academic theologians.

Because he measured the defects of German literary life against his (somewhat idealized) picture of France and England, Nicolai was acutely sensitive to the problems posed by the absence in Germany of any cultural center even remotely comparable to Paris or London. Later, in the romantic era, this very absence appeared to some commentators as a virtue, especially to Mme. de Stael, whose De l’Allemagne (1813) celebrated the artistic freedom born of Germany’s cultural decentralization and contrasted it favorably to the ossified classicism, cultural despotism, and slavish imitation of Parisian fashion characteristic of France. But this romantic outlook was entirely foreign to Nicolai’s sensibilities. To him, the relative isolation of German intellectuals was a major obstacle to the process of Enlightenment, which he conceived on the model of such direct, face-to-face discussions as he himself conducted with friends in Berlin. It was with a view to overcoming this obstacle that he launched the greatest publishing enterprise of his career: the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek (ADB), a review journal that he both published and edited from 1764 to 1792 and then again from 1800 to 1805.

Selwyn devotes a fascinating chapter to the ADB and to the enormous organizational difficulties posed by it. To maintain his production schedule, Nicolai had to badger dilatory reviewers and coordinate mammoth printing jobs, most of which he farmed out to presses beyond the borders of Prussia; he had to recruit reviewers from all across (Protestant) Germany; and he had to contend with the perils of intolerant censorship, especially in the Habsburg lands before the accession of Joseph II and in Prussia after the death of Frederick II. It is unlikely, of course, that Nicolai would have endured so many headaches for idealistic reasons alone. The ADB was the fulcrum of his entire business. Besides providing free advertising for his other publications, it sold very well in its own right—so well, in fact, that at the height of its prestige in the late 1770s, it was regularly printed at pressruns of 2,500 copies. Of the 1,100 volumes published by Nicolai during his career, nearly 20 percent were issues of the ADB. Yet Nicolai denied that the ADB was as lucrative as others imagined. It was an important part of his life’s work, so important that he expressed deep sorrow when the tightening of Prussian censorship forced him to abandon its publication in 1792. If, to quote Kant, the eighteenth century was an “age of critique,” then the ADB was its supreme embodiment: it provided a forum for critical discussion among the scattered intellectuals of German-speaking Europe and extended the practice of critique to all domains of contemporary literature.

Surveying the hardships endured by Nicolai during his stewardship of the ADB, one is tempted to picture him in heroic terms. And yet compared to the exalted self-image of nineteenth-century German booksellers, who frequently depicted the book trade as the vanguard of national unity, Nicolai’s was rather prosaic. In his best-selling novel Sebaldus Nothanker, Nicolai offered a portrait of himself through a fictional character, an unsentimental Leipzig bookseller named Hieronymus. About the fundamentally commercial nature of the book trade Hieronymus has few illusions. He realizes that booksellers pursue their own gain and frequently do so at the expense of the public, selling bad books, rather than good ones, according as their financial interests dictate. But at the same time, Hieronymus also cherishes values other than those of financial gain and strives to realize them, in so far as they are susceptible of realization, within the narrow constraints of the existing system. Like his fictional alter ego, Nicolai too was a man given to accommodation with the status quo, a businessman who pursued his ideals along the via media of prudent compromise.

When it came to censorship, for example, Nicolai’s views were as radical as the most radical Aufklärer. He abhorred not just the abuse of censorship but the institution itself. Rather than confronting the institution directly, however, he tried to outmaneuver it, farming out his printing jobs to printers in territories where surveillance was lax or where he stood on friendly terms with the local censors. And such a strategy succeeded reasonably well, at least until the reactionary backlash and the tightening of censorship that followed the death of Frederick II and the outbreak of the French Revolution. Similarly, Nicolai abhorred piracy, but he was more or less resigned to its inevitability and pessimistic about collective efforts to halt it. So he kept aloof from the reform movement launched by his Leipzig colleague Philipp Erasmus Reich. While Reich tried to organize booksellers to combat the scourge of piracy, Nicolai defended himself, as best he could, on an individual and ad hoc basis, either by appeals to government authorities or by direct negotiations with pirates or by reducing the prices of his own editions.

When it came to the selection of manuscripts for publication, however, it was possible for Nicolai to reconcile his principles with his financial self-interest. His own novel Sebaldus Nothanker, which pilloried religious fanaticism and intolerance, yielded handsome profits, and so too, in all likelihood, did the other classic works of the Enlightenment that Nicolai published: Mendelssohn’s Phädon, Eberhard’s Neue Apologie des Sokrates, Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden. Clearly, then, Nicolai was not a starry-eyed idealist, but neither was he the mercenary Buchmacher depicted by Kant and others of his enemies. In his dogged determination to unite the cause of Enlightenment with enlightened self-interest, Nicolai displayed what one can best describe, oxymoronically, as a kind of prosaic heroism.

Only one small problem detracts from Selwyn’s outstanding work. That is the almost total lack of tables and maps. Much of the material on the production and sale of books and on the geographic distribution of Nicolai’s trade would be more easily digestible and more vivid if presented graphically. Compared to the overall strengths of her work, however, this is a trivial objection; and besides, it concerns only the form, not the content, of her presentation. Selwyn’s study is a first-rate, meticulous work of scholarship, and as befits its subject matter, it is really two things wrapped into one—it makes an important contribution to the field of book history and an equally important contribution to the historiography on the Enlightenment.