Recent Books
- Recent Books
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Germany
Hard on the heels of Der Buchdrucker Maria Theresias. Johann Thomas Trattner (1719–1798) und sein Mediumimperium, edited by Christoph Augustynowicz and Johannes Frimmel (reviewed in The Library, VII, 21 (2020), 398–400), comes another valuable publication relating to the book trade in central Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a directory of printers and other members of the book trade in Bohemia. As such it usefully augments works such as Helmut W. Lang’s Die Buchdrucker des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts in Österreich (Baden-Baden, 1972), the second revised and enlarged edition of Christoph Reske’s Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet (Wiesbaden, 2015), and David Paisey’s Deutsche Buchdrucker, Buchhändler und Verleger, 1701–1750 (Wiesbaden, 1988). However, it goes much further than these in as much as it does not restrict itself to just printers or even to printers, booksellers, and publishers. Rather it attempts much wider coverage of the book trade, including bookbinders, engravers, lithographers, apprentices, even labourers and errand-boys, indeed everyone in any way connected with the trade. Whereas the listings by Lang, Reske, and Paisey are arranged alphabetically by place, Buchwesen in Böhmen comprises three lists. The first records the separate firms, from Achtsnit, Johann to Zýma, Anton Joseph (pp. 1–241), with a brief history of each. Next comes an alphabetical list of ‘Akteure’, that is, individual operatives, very many of whom were itinerent and thus often not long associated with a particular firm, in a single sequence, no matter what their specific specialism was (pp. 243–469), and finally there is a list of places, from Adlerfluss to Zbraslawitz with lists of the firms and the individuals associated with each (pp. 472–488). The largest number of individuals are linked with Brüx (Most), Budweis (České Budéjovice), Eger (Cheb), Jungbunzlau (Mladá Boleslav), Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), Klattau (Klatovy), Königgrätz (Hradec Králové), Kuttenberg (Kutná Hora), Leitmeritz (Leitméřice), Neuhaus (Jindřův Hradec), Přibram, Reichenberg (Liberec)—and of course Prague, though the individuals here are simply too numerous to list. Whereas the list of firms gives references to the individuals associated with each and cross-references to the bibliography, the list of individuals restricts itself largely to dates and their major employers, so that a fair amount of further searching in the often rather inaccessible items listed in the bibliography (pp. 489–508) is still required. Nevertheless, the book sheds a great deal of light on the interaction of Bohemian bookmen with their counterparts in the German-speaking world.
This is a most impresssive thesis submitted for a doctorate in book history at the University of Mainz in 2019. It focuses not on the books belonging to aristocrats, patricians, and great scholars but on those known to have been owned by forty-eight academically trained individuals, mostly lower-and middle-ranking clerics from the Mainz area around 1600, a period when information about book ownership in Germany is relatively sketchy. The investigation, which is based on a thorough examination of 1,341 works in 733 volumes mostly from the Wissenschaftliche Stadtbibliothek in Mainz, seeks to ascertain what the books can tell us about their owners’ social standing, their interests, and particularly about the way in which the books moved from owners to owners. Schmitz shows that the various religious houses, especially the Jesuits, played an unexpectedly significant role in this networking. The study ends with an eloquent plea for closer collaboration between libraries and researchers so that better use is made of the results of provenance research.
