Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (review)

It is genuinely refreshing to encounter a study that redirects the attention of German Studies to the central importance of material culture for the study of literature. Too often literary scholars become absorbed in intellectual navel gazing, losing sight of the broader cultural contexts of reading, writing, and publishing. We forget that marketing and packaging have proven more effective in reaching a larger audience over the centuries than the cogency of argument and style enclosed within a book’s covers. It is all part of what Bettina Dietz labels an “Epistemologie des Konkreten” or André Krischer “symbolisches Kapital” (both in Kulturen des Wissens, ed. U.J. Schneider, de Gruyter 2008, 596, 312) and what appears here as an expression of “Kultur-Merkantilismus,” whether in Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden (K. Wurst 82 n. 8) or in Die Gartenlaube (L. Tatlock 118). Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek (mentioned only in passing) is perhaps the most widely known example of making money and influencing politics with symbolic capital.

In undertaking this project with roots in an MLA panel in 2009, Tatlock has assembled a group of well- established and emerging scholars to remind us that the printed word is often more a matter of collecting, comfort, and convenience than of moral or intellectual improvement via the content. She divides the volume into four thematic sections with varying numbers of subchapters (indicated in parentheses): I. Distinction, Affiliation, and Education in Consuming Formats (4); II. Niche Markets, Reading Socialization, and Gender (2); III. Writers and Their Publishers (2); IV. Elite Culture, Mass Culture, and the Medium of the Book (3). The latter two sections tend to focus more tightly on specific individuals such as Heine and J. Campe (J. Sammons), Wedekind and A. Langen (M. Paddock), K. R. Langewiesche (K. Voelkner), and the collector E. Fuchs, whom U. Bach examines as “passionate gate keeper of memory” (295). Th. Rippey (Section IV) reads Schloss Gripsholm as “a paradigmatic response to the crisis of the book” in the wake of WWI (272), tracing agonistic forces of the literary avant-garde in Tucholsky. I would like to read his essay as the logical, critically self-reflective culmination of the commercialization of literature this volume parades before our eyes.

Rather than summarize what any reader can find in Tatlock’s introduction about the intent and structure of her undertaking, I seek to highlight red threads of understanding that link all eleven essays together against the backdrop of the social history of literature: a term that has, alas, fallen in disfavor because it has proven so difficult to write in an encompassing manner about the social and economic conditions affecting the history of literature and book publishing.

The eleven essays in this volume address the intricate publication and distribution networks that shaped the creative act of writing, the preference for certain genres, the development of ever widening reading circles, the privatization of the reading act, the shaping of a cultural canon, and the joys of collecting, as well as the diminution of cultural capital to concrete objects. All this is a part and parcel of the book trade in its widest meaning. Whether it is a matter of owning one’s own copy of a Damenkalender, acquiring a luxury edition of C. M. Wieland’s collected works (M. Erlin), investing in an edition of the expansive Brockhaus Conversationslexikon (K. Belgum), producing reading materials for the schools such as A. Kippenberg’s Deutsches Lesebuch (J. Mikota), consuming novels by Marlitt well past their initial publication date (Tatlock), assessing the cultural value of Die Gartenlaube (Wurst), or exposing the tangled relationship between authors and publishers (Sammons, Paddock, Rippey), each of these acts bears witness to the transformation of the creative act of writing with its aesthetic, philosophical, and entertainment value into an acquirable object for display as well as for moral self-improvement. The evolution...