Exit Tauchnitz

No longer will homing U.S. tourists shiver as they smuggle cheap, paperbound, Tauchnitz classics ("Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the U.S.A.") past uninterested U.S. customs officers. The Nazis have decreed that the century-old Tauchnitz Library must cease publishing works of U.S. and British writers, which make up the bulk of its 6,000 English-language titles.

The library has sold some 4,000,000 books since 21-year-old Bernhard Baron Tauchnitz first thought of bringing U.S. and British authors to the Continent in handy format, at modest cost (about 20-c- a copy).

Bulwer-Lytton was Tauchnitz's first author. Soon the library published Dickens, Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Macaulay, Thackeray, Carlyle, Trollope, George Eliot. Later it published Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy. Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Zane Grey, Kathleen Norris were among its most popular U.S. writers. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes sold 100,000 copies.

Unlike his business rivals, who pirated British and American books right & left, Tauchnitz paid his authors, introduced a royalty system, plugged the first international-copyright treaty between Britain, Prussia and Saxony (in 1846).

In 1934 Tauchnitz was merged with its most powerful rival, the Albatross Modern Continental Library, managed by John Holroyd-Reece, onetime British cavalry officer, founder of the arty Pegasus Press and the Pantheon Series. He controlled his multilateral book business through Publishing Holding Co., with main offices in Paris, branches in London and Leipzig.

Until the war the Nazis permitted Tauchnitz to continue distributing its British and American authors, because this meant enormous printing orders placed in Germany. As late as August 1939, Holroyd-Reece wrote his Leipzig staff: "Tauchnitz has survived four [wars] and we will survive the fifth." One month after the Nazis marched into Paris they took over Publishing Holding Co.

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