The Publishers’ Archives keep around 15,000 specimen copies of publications (books, journals, video and sound tapes) as well as about 10,500 diverse documents (author-publisher correspondences, manuscripts, cover designs, advertising materials, production and license documents, etc.).
The Publishers’ Archives were founded in 2009 by Prof. Stephan Füssel, head of the former Institute of Book Studies at Mainz University, and have been part of the “Archives and Collections” of the University Library since 2022. The collection was initiated with the takeover of a large part of the Rowohlt Publishers’ Archives from Reinbek near Hamburg (non-fiction, specialized books, children and youth books, pocket books, production documents, etc.), the other part of which (German literature, philosophy) is kept in the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar. In the same year, the unique publishing archives of Rotbuch, Syndikat and the “Europäische Verlagsanstalt” were acquired through a transfer of ownership by the publishing couple Dr. Sabine and Kurt Groenewold (Hamburg). Partial archives of Eichborn (Frankfurt a.M.), Brockhaus (Mannheim) and Weissbooks (Frankfurt) as well as the complete production archives of the Faksimile Publishing House (Lucerne/Munich) were added.
The Mainz Publishers’ Archives thus offers the opportunity to explore the influence of important publishing houses which formed the social and political reality since the second half of the twentieth century. Students work with archival documents both in courses and for their theses, but researchers from Germany and abroad also visit the archive.
Some of the documents in the Rotbuch Publishers’ Archives are already available via Kalliope, the union catalog for estates and autographs, and more are being made accessible. Copyright-free documents can be viewed as digital copies on the Gutenberg Capture page.
From the Collection
Ansichtssache!
Crime-Can
