Aeltestesbewahrt mit Treue,
Freundlich aufgefasstes Neue. . . .
—Goethe

The destruction of the firm of Poeschel & Trepte in November 1943 and the death of Carl Ernst Poeschel five months later marked the end of a career which more than any other had helped to bring German printing back into the mainstream of a European tradition. In the early years of the century, when Poeschel and his friends were beginning to cut their way out of the stifling atmosphere of the Jugendstil, they were often accused of too great a leaning towards England; for, inspired by William Morris and Cobden-Sanderson and preferring to use roman types, they strove for simple dignity in printing. Young men as they were, they could not resist the temptation of giving free rein to their high spirits. The then head of the Deutsches Buchmuseum was a pompous dignitary, and one of their main adversaries. As the result of a purely fictitious telegram they had sent, the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten reported that this gentleman, ‘in recognition of his unrivalled merits for the emergent German Buchkultur, and for so courageously taking up the cudgels in the battle against snobbish Engländerei, has been elected president of the Verdandi-Bund’, a notorious and much-ridiculed organization which busied itself with glorifying so-called Teutonic art and culture.

This exploit, told many years later by Walter Tiemann, Poeschel’s close friend and collaborator in the early days, may not have been more than a schoolboy prank, but none the less it showed the current into which they, together with E.R. Weiss, Anton Kippenberg, Count Harry Kessler, Julius Zeitler, and a few others, were trying to direct the art of the book in their country. Admittedly they were looking towards England, but it was soon to become apparent that they were not mere imitators. One of their motives was fear for the future of the book. They believed that it was being suffocated by the excess of luxuriant foliage so characteristic of Van de Velde’s art nouveau which, in Germany, developed into the Jugendstil.

As a reaction against the hackneyed and barren ornamentation in mock renaissance and baroque—the heavy-handed German counterpart of late Victorianism at its worst—the Jugendstil should not be written off lightly: it was indeed the first attempt at skimming off the dross that had accumulated during the nineteenth century; but it could be no more than a phase, and before long there were people anxious to hack a path out of this ever-thickening jungle and struggle for light and air. To Poeschel and his circle must go the credit for having shown the way to sanity and legibility and for having created, within a short span of years, a style that even today can be accepted without reserve.

The bare facts of Poeschel’s life are soon told. Born on 2 September 1874, he was the son of Heinrich Ernst Poeschel, who, together with the publisher Justus Naumann and the printer Emil Trepte, had founded the firm in 1870. There was never any doubt in the father’s mind that his son must become his successor, but Carl Ernst had different ideas: he wanted to become an architect. We cannot help wondering whether, had he had his will, he might have attained eminence in a field whose leading exponents have frequently ventured into typographic activities, not always with conspicuous success.

Those were the days of paternal authority, and the son had little hope of breaking his father’s unbending will. Thus, grudgingly and still struggling, Poeschel entered the firm as an apprentice; but suddenly he became aware of his vocation as a printer. At the end of his apprenticeship, he was allowed to study at Munich for a few terms, where, we are told, he moved much among artists. At the age of twenty-three he went to the United States and in the course of two years broadened his knowledge of printing, first at New York, and later at Chicago and Pittsburgh. He gained there not only the friendship of Adelaide Harrington, whom he married in 1901, but also his first acquaintance with Kelmscott Press books. Though it is not recorded, it would be surprising if he did not also come across the early work of Daniel Berkeley Updike. Certain it is that his interest in printing abroad, particularly in the United States and England, was awakened during those years and never ceased thereafter. In later years he was to become the friend and admirer of men like Stanley Morison, Oliver Simon, Method Kaláb, Raffaelo Bertieri, and he was one of the few foreign honorary members of the Double Crown Club.

On his return to Leipzig Poeschel entered the family business. His father lived to the age of eighty-six and continued to work in the firm until his death in 1927, but long before this, the control of its affairs had passed into the hands of the son. We rightly think of him first and foremost as a printer of books, the head of a firm whose typographic style he developed in an astonishingly short period and maintained at a high standard of excellence over many years.

To appreciate Poeschel we must not look for anything sensational or for the over-lavishness that has been the defect of much German de luxe printing. Clarity and restraint, freedom from eccentricity, thorough technical ‘knowledge, and a subtle regard for typographic niceties—these are the qualities which entitle us to single him out from a number of excellent rivals and ascribe to him the first place among the German printers of this century. Though he founded the first German private press and was also for a time engaged in publishing, it is mainly the sustained excellence of the trade books he printed which compel our respect and admiration.

It is difficult to trace the origins of ‘movements’, and the history of modern German printing is no exception. So much is certain: at the turn of the century there was a growing interest in the art of the book. Stefan George’s Blätter für die Kunst had appeared, and in 1894 the periodical Pan was founded, which not only brought before the German public the work of William Morris, but also made daring use of type and decoration and was produced with an extravagance which in these days of austerity is almost incomprehensible. Die Insel, a periodical founded by Rudolf Alexander Schroder, Alfred Walter Heymel, and Otto Julius Bierbaum, in 1899, caused a sensation because it used Otto Eckmann’s new type, cut by Klingspor. At Munich, Ham von Weber was to launch the splendid periodical Hyperion in 1908 and select Poeschel as his printer. A year later was to come his Zwiebelfisch (named after the characters relegated to the ‘hell box’ of a case of type), where, in a torrent of invective and wit, he exposed those who were trying to put spokes in the wheels of the nascent movement. On occasions he also praised the few who were earnestly striving for better printing.

At Berlin, Ludwig Sütterlin had gained recognition for his posters, book covers, and title-pages and was endeavouring to bring about a reform of German handwriting, replacing the degenerate survivals of copperplate hands by simpler and sounder forms. But he had not the historical knowledge nor the bent of an Edward Johnston or a Robert Bridges, and his influence was not lasting. It was left to E.R. Weiss to bridge the gap between the past and present by infusing historical forms with new life; and to Rudolf Koch to enrich lettering with his large output, penetrated by a deeply religious fervour.

Soon after his return from America we find Poeschel at work as one of the pioneers of the new book. In 1902 there appeared the first book he designed, Rudolf Kautzsch’s Die Neue Buchkunst, published by the Weimar Gesellschaft der Bibliophilen and set in Peter Behrens’s new type, which, like Eckmann’s, was not yet free from Jugendstil elements. In the same year he printed Ricarda Huch’s Dornröschen:Ein Märchenbild for Eugen Diederichs, a Jena publisher who was to become another important supporter of the revival. In the Festschrift dedicated to Poeschel for his sixtieth birthday in 1934 Helene Voigt-Diederichs remembers those days, their drawn and heavily ornamented title-pages, their over-elaborate endpapers and head and tail-pieces, and all the other paraphernalia that were thought to be indispensable in the making of a fine book. Addressing Poeschel, she continues: ‘One evening you brought us the latest book printed at Poeschel & Trepte. . . . You raised the slim, flexible, cloth-bound volume, looked right and left in triumph. Your delight in the excellent paper, the finely cut and well-arranged type, communicated itself to us. Everybody felt: away from imitation and too much decoration.’ Quite soon Poeschel was to acquire a remarkable skill in the arrangement of printers’ flowers, but decorative material of good design was as scarce then as were good type-faces, and with sure instinct he gave his attention first of all to type and sound composition. More will be said later about the part he was to play in reviving old German founts and encouraging the use of contemporary ones.

Opening page from Monatsblätter (Hübel & Denck), 1927

We now must turn briefly to Poeschel’s work as a publisher. A few months after his return from America he acquired that part of a Stuttgart publishing firm which specialized in books on economics and commerce. Renamed ‘C.E. Poeschel-Verlag’, it soon became known for the quality of its output. One of its authors, Georg Obst, has paid a tribute to Poeschel’s gifts as publisher. Personal discussions, he tells us, were more to his liking than long correspondence, and the plans for the great symposium, Das Buch des Kaufmanns, and the Zeitschrift für Handelswissenschaft und Handelspraxis were made largely on Sunday outings and other social occasions. The same typographic care was given to these projects as to books on art and belles-lettres, and it is characteristic of Poeschel’s outlook that the Zeitschrift für Handelswissenschaft contained a supplement, Der Kaufmann und das Leben, which carried insets by contemporary artists. Not until 1919, when Poeschel found on his return from the war that the printing-office required all his attention and energy, did he dispose of his publishing firm. By then, its reputation had become such that the new owners continued it under his name.

Another important factor in Poeschel’s career as publisher was his friendship with Anton Kippenberg. They first met in 1902, when Kippenberg was working for a scientific publisher in Leipzig and was straining to enter fields more congenial to his nature. Their first common venture was a complete edition, not then in existence, of the letters of Goethe’s mother, but their real opportunity came when, on 1 July 1905, they jointly took over the control of the Insel Verlag, which Kippenberg was to lead to fame far beyond the frontiers of Germany. To begin with, the future of the firm was most uncertain. Its financial position was desperate, and its name, except among a few, smacked rather of precociousness. It had grown out of the periodical, Die Insel; Rilke and Hofmannsthal were on its list; but the greater part of the stock had been built up haphazardly rather than with a firm purpose. Once more Heymel, its founder, was prevailed upon to help financially, and with zeal and resource the two young took up their task.

Page from the ‘Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr’ 1921

By a strange coincidence the offices of the firm, until their destruction in 1944, were in the same building, Kurze Strasse 7, in which Poeschel was born, and it was here, in 1906, that the first Insel-Almanach was published under the motto which appears at the beginning of this article. For many years the Almanach did not only give a foretaste of the firm’s publishing programme, but in its calendar pages also presented the printer—frequently Poeschel—with an opportunity for exercising his typographical ingenuity. Not all was smooth sailing, and before long there was fiction between the two men which estranged them for a time and led to their separation in September 1906. Nevertheless, the two firms, Poeschel & Trepte and Insel-Verlag, cannot be thought of without remembering these early ties and the kinship of their aims, and in the years between the wars many fine books with the Insel ship device were printed by Poeschel, from the Insel-Büchlein at less than a shilling to some of its most ambitious enterprises.

At the end of August 1907 collectors and bibliophiles received announcement and an invitation to subscribe to the publications of the Janus-Presse. The prospectus was a document of some importance in that it outlined the aims of the first German private press. It was signed by Poeschel and Tiemann, who, with commendable restraint, described what they were about to begin. Though, in the sixteen years of its existence, the number of publications from the press was small, the selected texts were of true worth and the execution of the highest standard. The following were published :

Goethe: Römische Elegien. 150 copies, 35 pages, 1907.

Goethe: Torquato Tasso. 150 copies, 161 pages, 1910.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Das Märchen der 672. Nacht. 200 copies, 28 pages, 1918 (publication held up by the war).

[Susette Gontard: ] Die Briefe der Diotima [an Friedrich Hölderlin]. 320 copies, 72 1920.

Adalbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemiehls Schicksale (first publication of the original version of Peter Schlemiehl). 335 copies, 85 pages, 1923.

A further volume, which was to have followed Tasso, never saw the light of day. Only a prospectus exists, announcing Grillparzer’s Des Meeres und der Wellen, illustrated with six wood-engravings by H.A. Mueller. The five published volumes have titles and initial letters engraved on wood by Tiemann as their only decoration. They were printed by the two men on a hand-press in black and red and bound in vellum or quarter vellum. They are difficult to come by and the British Museum owns only the Hofmannsthal. This book shows that the Janus type is a forerunner of Tiemann’s well-known ‘Mediaeval’, about sixteen point in size. According to a note in Das Inselschiff, Easter 1923, the type was placed in the archives of the Insel-Verlag when the press closed down. Thus it must be feared that it is no more accessible today than the Doves Press type at the bottom of the Thames beneath Hammersmith Bridge.

Poeschel’s most significant publishing venture was the ‘Tempel-Klassiker’. They were the outcome of his being approached almost simultaneously by four publishers with a view to printing editions of the classics in a handy format, to replace the desiccated volumes, half-bound with false raised bands, which were so typical of the later nineteenth century. Rather than flood the market competing editions, it was decided, at Poeschel’s suggestion, to form a company in which each of the publishers, the printer, and the typefounder, were partners. The colophon of these books is of a type which must be very rare in the field of publishing: ‘Der / Tempel / Verlag in Leipzig / Gesellschafier des Verlags: S. Fischer · Eugen Diederichs / Hans von Weber · Julius Zeitler / Carl Ernst Poeschel · Georg Hartmam / Gedruckt in der Weiss-Fraktur / und Tiemann-Mediaeval / bei Poeschel & Trepte / in Leipzig’. (This is as it appears in the Shakespeare, printed in German and English on facing pages.)

The volumes were undated but began appearing in 1909.E.R. Weiss’s ‘Fraktur’, cut by the Bauersche Giesserei, was used throughout. Indeed, the Tempel-Verlag obtained the exclusive right to this type for a number of years, and on the title-page of the remarkable specimen book issued by Bauer in 1923 the Weiss-Fraktur is described as Die Schrift des Tempel-Verlags. Weiss also designed the bindings, and together with Poeschel was responsible for the typography. Now more than thirty years old, the Tempel classics are seen to have retained all their freshness and elegance and can stand comparison with great editions of the classics in the past.

Page from Poescel and Trepte’s ‘Kalendar für 1926′

It would be of great interest to compare the methods by which eminent printers and typographers, particularly those who are masters in the use of printers’ flowers, arrive at their results. A few, like Bruce Rogers, have described their procedure, but most of them are reticent or unduly modest in 1etting us watch them at work. What would we not give to learn something about the preparation that went into Fournier’s exquisite concoctions of rococo fleurons! It would seem that every kind of lay-out exists, from the rapidly done rough sketch on the back of an old envelope, requiring a high degree of interpretative skill on the part of the compositor, to the careful paste-up giving every small detail. It has been impossible to find out how Poeschel worked. All records were lost the offices and archives were destroyed in 1943.It is known that in 1903 and 1904 he held courses for typographical design at Hamburg and Leipzig. He must therefore have been familiar with the technique of making good working lay-outs. Nevertheless one is inclined to think that as the years went by and a distinct style was developed at his firm, much could be left to a good compositor who would work from fairly rough indications.

Poeschel’s interests did not end with the printing and publishing of books, for he paid great attention to jobbing printing and the design of advertisements. Many of the fine pages of advertising in the Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel were designed by him and so were the advertisements pages in Imprimatur. Likewise, the posters of the Gewandhaus, the famous concert hall in Leipzig, were planned by him in a purely typographic style. Shortly before the Second World War he was also engaged on redesigning the typography of the Kölnische Zeitgung, but nothing came of this plan.

It goes without saying that Poeschel was a pioneer in the use of fine types. The practice of setting books by hand survived somewhat longer in Germany than in this country, and it was not uncommon, even in the twenties, to produce large books without the use of composing-machines. Next to the Weiss-Fraktur, it was that strange attempt at a rationale of Fraktur, carried out by Johann Friedrich Unger around 1800, for which he had a special affection. Among the various versions that have survived, and which were inspired by the Didot experiments with roman types, he was particularly fond of the first attempt of 1793, and used it in a number of Hausdrucke. (The list of these—i.e. books and booklets printed for private circulation among friends and clients of the press—is large. A bibliography covering the period from 1902 to 1920 appeared in O.E. Ebert’s ‘Aus der Werkstatt Poeschel & Trepte’, Alere Flamman: Festschrift für Georg Minde-Pouet, pages 7–37, 1921.The succeeding years were covered by the section ‘Poeschel & Trepte’ in Julius Rodenberg’s Deutsche Pressen, 1925, new edition in preparation.) He was the first to draw renewed attention to the merits of the roman type by Johann Justus Walbaum and made extensive use of it. Before long, it became most popular in Germany and was later introduced into England by The Curwen Press. The original punches, like those of the Unger-Fraktur survived in the Berthold foundry, and both types were soon made available on composing-machines.

It would be wrong to imagine that Poeschel was not mindful of the changes that were being brought about by the development of mechanical composition. Like others to whom printing is more than a commercial activity, he may not at first have liked the thought of mechanizing his composing-room; but the economic crisis in the years following the First World War and the growing competition convinced him of the need for modernizing his equipment. He installed Monotype machines in 1924 and gave advice to the Monotype Corporation in London on the cutting of suitable types for use in Germany.

Throughout his working life, the practice of typography rather than its theory was Poeschel’s main concern. Rarely, as in Deutscher Buchdruck: Gestern, Heute, Morgen (1925), or in an address delivered in 1941, on the occasion of an exhibition of his work at Leipzig (which in the previous year had presented him with the ‘Gutenberg Ring’), did he discuss the theoretical foundations of his work. A passing reference, at the beginning of this address, to the evil effects of Gutenberg’s invention, may perhaps be taken to express as much as he dared to show of his true feelings about the German tragedy that would presently enter upon its gruesome last act. His old friend, Julius Rodenberg, relates that in conversation with friends he sometimes spoke of the dark cloud hanging over his country since 1933; but he was spared to witness the full extent of the catastrophe; for he died on 19 May 1944, shortly before his seventieth birthday.

Title-pages from two volumes of the ‘Insel-Bücheret’

Those who look for the spectacular in Poeschel’s work will be disappointed. His approach was straightforward, and his solutions were logical and clear. Typographic stunts, such as period typography in its less restrained form, were foreign to him, and the experiments and theories with which German printers and designers were preoccupied in the twenties affected him little. Once a clearly defined style had been established, he saw no need for radical changes, though it became noticeably more polished as the years went by. It should be remembered, however, that he and his friends had fought and won their battle, and achieved maturity, almost twenty years before the English printing revival began to gather real impetus. In this, as well as in the excellence of his work on a broad front and engaging personality—free from arrogance and flamboyance, and modestly devoted to his craft—lies Poeschel’s claim to remembrance.

H.P. Schmoller

This article first appeared in the month year issue of Signature, pp 20–34.