Paul Englisch
NOTES
ON 19th Century PUBLISHERSOFGERMAN EROTICA

Scissors & Paste Bibliographies
Santa Rosa, CA2019

NOTE

This short but useful text was originally published in the periodical Philobiblon : Eine Zeitschrift fur Büchersammler. (2,4.
1929. pp. 113-116). I am greatly indebted to Hartmut-Ortwin
Feistel for agreeing to translate it into English for inclusion on
this website; with only minor amendments it is entirely Hartmut’s work. – P.J.K.

…And what of Germany (and Austria)? Here as well there
has been no lack of courageous publishers who preferred risking
everything to giving up the distribution of curiosa.
Starting with the 1848 revolution, there was an upsurge inerotic publishing. Here the main ‘credit’ is due to J. Scheible
who, in Stuttgart, maintained unfathomable rooms that weretrue treasuries of erotic rarities, among them numerous copiesof the three extremely valuable bibliographies of Pisanus Fraxi
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(Henry Spencer Ashbee), long since vanished from the market.
Bibliophiles could search through these treasures for hours, always finding something new. As the trade in French originals
was blooming, Scheible began to publish German translations.
But no great care was spent on their production, and they werecomparatively cheap. Die philosophische Therese for instance,
one of the finest French erotic books of the 18th century, only
cost 1 Thaler 10 Silbergroschen. Besides publishing pornography, he was also interested in sexology, in those days a highly
suspect subject; these books were however not published over
his name.
Equally famous was August Prinz, of Altona1 who produced
one erotica after the other, either over the imprint of VerlagsBureau, Altona, Reginald Chesterfield, Boston, or I. J. Wagner,Neustadt, which were poorly printed on worse paper. In 1874
he closed down this kitchen of bawdry after an already overlong production run. He also published the first edition of
Memoiren einer Sängerin, attributed to the famous Wilhelmine
Schröder-Devrient. No sure proof of the authorship exists,
however, so that the text has sometimes – I think wrongly –attributed to Prinz himself: it is much too fluently written andshows a wide knowledge of the world, which would be moreplausible in the case of Schröder-Devrient.
Wilhelm Digel at Hamburg, later Stuttgart, Himburg in Berlin (under the pseudonym ‘Pietro Tarone’), Fischhaber in Reutlingen, Wallishauser in Vienna, Graeff in Leipzig, all publishedmany erotic titles. Of these only Digel survives, and even now
partially clings to his once cherished inclinations.
The end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century
brought a new flourishing of erotic literature. Pride of placemust go to C. W. Stern of Vienna, who was active from 1906
to 1912. The firm advertised quite openly in popular journals1Then a town near, and today part of, Hamburg.

3like Jugend and Simplicissimus and thus attracted customers for
its pornographic publications from around the world, even inhigher circles of society, who, due to their influence, helped toprevent the prosecution of their supplier. Stern eschewed cheap,
worthless pornography and instead made possible the publication of first class works like Cary Von Karwath’s Die Erotik inder Kunst (1908), Grand-Carteret’s Die Erotik in derfranzösischen Karikatur (1909), Monnier, Rops, &c. Finally
however, the flood of anger of the guardians of morality
breached the levees, and one day the police carried off five carloads of superb erotic publications from the premises of the enterprising firm. They comprised 30,000 volumes with a materialvalue of about 150,000 Austrian crowns. Still, only about halfof the impounded books reached the authorities, as the otherhalf were sold off by the police to scrounging collectors on theway. The punishment was surprisingly lenient; Stern was sentenced on 31 May 1913 to pay a fine of 100 crowns – about 80
marks2 – for contravention of the ban against cheap sensationalism, possibly because the judge considered him sufficiently
punished through the loss of his stock.
Only slightly less important was the Wiener Verlag, whoseowner, Fritz Freund, published quite a few reprints and translations of erotic literature. He had, for instance, Sade’s Justine andJuliette translated, which were distributed through his representative Eichberg, who, unable to make money out of it,
jumped in despair into the Seine. Freund needs to be mentioned
as well because he first published Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen(1903) and also because he was the first publisher of one of themost popular German erotic books, Josefine Mutzenbacher, dieGeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne 3, the genesis of which is2In 1929, 80 Reichsmarks was the approximate equivalent of $20.
Josefine Mutzenbacher, the Story of a Viennese Whore (1906).
The titlepage of what is probably the second edition, published in thesame year, is reproduced above.
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not without piquancy. Freund assigned the writing to a wellknown writer Felix S*** 4(4), who finished two thirds of it before asking for a higher royalty. When Freund refused his demand, the author stopped work and the resourceful publisher
then asked the journalist Willi Handl,5 who died only recently,
to finish the book. Handl did a very satisfactory job, so that thenovel doesn't seem the work of two authors.
I shall desist from naming publishers belonging to present
times for reasons that will easily be understood, but none ofthem can be called outstanding. This might also be caused by atypically Viennese idiosyncrasy, in that here printers produce
erotica on their own and then go looking for distributors, as aresult of which the dealers get caught more frequently than thepublishers.
In Budapest, Gustav Grimm and Fritz Sachs (trading also as
the firm of Sachs & Pollack or the Pannonia Bookshop) werethe most well-known, the latter concentrating on the basest
pornography, and flooding the market with pornographic photographs and the like at very cheap prices.
In Berlin, it was Willy Schindler who, around 1910, wascommitted to the distribution of erotic literature. In his journal
Blätter für Bibliophile, of which only four issues were published, he gave information about new publications, some ofwhich he’d published himself. Hayn-Gotendorf name him as
the author of books published under the pseudonym of ‘Richard Werther’.
All these publishers were very clever and quite aware of thefact that they were treading on very thin ice. Quite often they
therefore used the cover of a society, pretending that they wereproducing private editions for limited membership. In reality,
4

Felix Salten (1869-1945). The attribution of Josefine Mutzen-bacher to Salten has been disputed.
5Siegmund Wilhelm ‘Willi’ Handl (1872 – 1920), Austrian author& theatre critic.

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the society usually consisted of just the publisher himself. Already Jules Gay had used this same trick earlier, in the 1870s and80s; in 1871, for example, he'd founded the ‘Société des bibliophiles Cosmopolites’, the only members of which were himself and his son Jean. He was imitated by C. W. Stern and his‘Gesellschaft deutscher und österreichischer Biliophilen6 andWilly Schindler’s ‘Internationale Vereinigung zum Studium derSexualwissenschaft’7(6), which was of serious intent and actually
had quite a large number of members.
However, of fantasy pure and simple were:The ‘Eros-Gesellschaft’ of Munich (in reality in Berlin),which published masterpieces of erotic world literature in
mostly well illustrated, fine editions. The only member of thiswas the bookseller Fritz Jentsch. Its catchy name was exploitedby ‘Eri-Gesellschaft’, ‘Eros Verlag’, and ‘Aphrodite-Verlag,
Strasbourg.’
The ‘Bimini-Gesellschaft,’ which issued the Silberne Bücher
der Insel Bimini series, was published by the bookseller
Johndorff, who sold his productions via three travelling sales
agents to private customers, earning so much money that he wasable to acquire the majority holding of a well-known publishinghouse.
In Berlin, the 'Bimini-Club' consisted of just the two entrepreneurs, F. Schwalbe and Otto Wiehle, the latter having a sideline in counterfeiting so called ‘wallpaper’ 50-Mark banknotes.
The ‘Iris-Gesellschaft’ in Frankfurt/Main even published amonthly journal.
F. Edgar Shulz founded the ‘Collectionneur-Club in Charlottenburg.’86‘Society of German and Austrian Bibliophiles.’‘International Association for the Study of Sexology.’8
Charlottenburg was then near, and now part of, Berlin.
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A special case was the ‘Internationale Zentralverband derBibliophilen über Volkserotik aller Zeiten und Völker’9(8) ofFriedrich Karl Holzinger, aka Ferdinand Rodenstein (alias alsoas Dr Schwimmer, Siegfried Freiherr Von Fried, WaldemarFerkes, Dr Steinröder &c.), who was utterly convinced of theimportance of pornography. His journal Der Venus-Tempel(1919-1925) published some quite interesting material, including information concerning legal proceedings against the publisher. By May 1922 he claimed that the society had 501 members, though that number would diminish rapidly due to police
searches of the homes of members. Rodenstein not only wrote
a number of pornographic texts, but also ran a lending library
where members could, for a fee, borrow erotic publications –for study purposes, of course. As a bibliomaniac completely lostin his passion, he bound some of the books in his library inkeeping with their content. In the 18th century, particularly inFrance, there had been bibliophiles who had their erotic books
bound in skin from women's breast, including the nipple; Rodenstein went one step further in having his bindings embellished with other female sexual characteristics.
Rodenstein's not very select but extensive library was confiscated in 1928 when he offered it for sale, and it has now founda final home in the Department II of the Berlin police headquarters. The collection contains numerous manuscripts, mostlyof flagellant content, which show that Rodenstein, left to hisdevices, might have given the world many an erotic book.
With very few exceptions, none of the publishers of such
literature made a financial success out of it. On the contrary,
many of them had to pay for their operations with heavy fines
and jail terms as well as the loss of the money they’d invested inconfiscated materials. Only one enterprise – not however residing on German soil – is said to have flourished, and even made9

‘International Central Association of Amateurs of Popular Erotics
of all Time and Peoples.’7its proprietors into the owners of large houses. This was theBibliothèque des curieux in Paris, 4 rue de Furstenberg, a publishing house belonging to the brothers George and Robert
Briffaut, which existed from about 1908 to 1924.10 Their publicity in Germany was quite active, and an army of smugglers
carried the contraband goods across the borders – the brothers
knew their business. In spite of small editions and careful production of each erotic text, the prices were kept extremely low(between 6 and 25 francs). The most famous works of erotic
world literature were reborn, accompanied by well-informed
bibliographical and historical introductions by competent bibliophiles such as Guillaume Apollinaire. When the police seized
the books heaped up in the business offices in rue Boissyd'Anglas, they needed two heavy trucks for their removal. Another warehouse was discovered at 22 rue Milton, under thename of Merlin, and here a great number of packages ready tobe posted were impounded. The total weight of the seized material was estimated at 400 hundredweight.11 A third storeroom
was found at James Joffe’s, 54 rue Saint Martin, though here thematerials amounted to only 6 hundredweight. Finally, a keen
police inspector discovered in Butry (Oise), at the premises ofthe photographer Langlois, stores of 400 negatives and 10,000
enlargements of pornographic photographs. The two owners of
this far-flung enterprise owned a plush château and earned anannual net profit of 800,000 gold francs from the distribution oferotica. The extraordinary success of their initial publishing efforts seems to have led the owners to arrange their enterprise in
too businesslike a manner.
In the meanwhile, in contradistinction to Germany and Austria, where even now there are mostly poor editions on bad
10In fact, the company existed at the same address until at least
1949, in which year it published J. Rives Childs’ fine bibliography of
Restif de la Bretonne.
11
About 400 metric tons.

8paper with many misprints and kitschy illustrations, a change oftaste has occurred in France. Erotic books published there recently are distinguished by refined taste and a meticulous delicacy of production, proving that first class artists are being employed and that wealthy publishers who love their work areproducing choice items for well-to-do booklovers – without
regard to the hazards of outmoded laws.
Translation © 2019 Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel

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