The significance of April 4th, a reflection

Abstract

April 4th 2006, is a special day. The significance of this day is not so much in the fact that it is my 65th birthday, which Arnoud de Kemp (against my advice and better judgment) just made so very clear to you in his own inimitable way. Rather, it has to do with the fact that today, exactly one hundred years ago, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, the forerunner of Academic Press, was born. On April 4th, 1906 a bookseller named Leo Jolowicz signed what in the UK would be called the ‘Articles of Association’ of a newly formed ‘GmbH’ (Limited Company) by that name in the city of Leipzig. [The reason that I stand here before you now to speak about this may be that I was the last president of Academic Press before it ceased to be a relatively independent entity and became an Elsevier imprint in 2002.] Jolowicz came from a Jewish family of booksellers and antiquarians and was born in Posen (now Poznan, well inside the Polish border) in August 1868 and moved to Leipzig, the city famous for its annual book fairs (a role taken over by Frankfurt after WW II), to work as an apprentice with a well known bookstore there (Gustav Fock). After spending some time with its overseas branch in New York (Fock had another one in Tokyo), Jolowicz married Martha Finkelstein in 1901 and ultimately settled in Leipzig. The couple had two daughters, Agnes-Charlotte in 1903 and Anna-Liese in 1906, and in 1908 his son Walter was born. Although Walter was destined to enter the book profession in the family tradition, he made some side steps and studied archaeology at the Universities of Heidelberg, Vienna, London and Leipzig, after which he became a partner in the family business. Agnes-Charlotte married Kurt Jacoby, who later played a prominent role in the company and its successor in the United States, Academic Press. In 1901, the first Nobel Prizes were awarded (in physics, chemistry, physiology & medicine, literature in peace), 5 years after the death of Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and blasting gelatin. The importance of German science in the early 20th century was demonstrated by the fact that in the period from 1901 until 1932 31 Nobel Prize winners were German. As a result of this German predominance in the sciences, several German publishers had become or became prominent – Springer, Teubner, Thieme and Wolff, to name a few –, many new journals were started and many Nobel Prize winners were involved as authors and editors. In fact, Springer, which was started in 1842 alongside a bookstore, already published 20 science journals as early as 1889! From the beginning, Jolowicz aimed high in terms of quality. One of his first publications was ‘Theorien der Chemie’, by Svant Arrhenius, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1903. The ‘Akademische’ became the second German publisher after Springer in a relatively short time. As now, science was global and 60% of the sales of these publishers were from exports. Needless to say, the fact that German science publishing was so advanced in those days had everything to do with the eminence of German science.