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Trübner & Co.

British, 1855 - 1889

BiographyLC name authority rec. n81144561
LC heading: Trübner & Co.
Biography:
Trübner, Nicholas (1817–1884), publisher and philologist, was born on 17 June 1817 at Heidelberg, Germany, the eldest of four sons of a goldsmith and his wife. His first school was the local Gymnasium where he began to study ancient and modern languages. He was apprenticed in 1831 to a university bookseller of Heidelberg, J. C. B. Mohr; during six years in that position he encountered numerous scholars and pursued his further education. Later he worked in bookshops in Göttingen (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), Hamburg (Hoffmann and Campe), and Frankfurt am Main (Willmann). While in Frankfurt, Trübner met William Longman, a partner in the English publishing firm, who offered him a position as foreign corresponding clerk. He moved to London in 1843, became fluent in English, travelled frequently to continental Europe on business, and continued to pursue his scholarly interests. His first publication was a translation, Sketches of Flemish Life by Hendrik Conscience (1846).

Having arrived in London without capital, Trübner's first business venture after leaving Longman's employ was with a partner. Beginning in 1851, Trübner and Thomas Delf set up an agency for the sale of American books in Britain, continuing the trade established ten years earlier by Wiley and Putnam. After some initial difficulties they were joined by David Nutt. As well as importing books from the United States, the firm in Ludgate Hill specialized in the literature of India and Asia (‘oriental literature’) and in philology and philosophy. In 1855 was published the first edition of Trübner's Bibliographical Guide to American Literature. His first visit to the United States brought the development of important relationships with American writers and publishers. An early result was an edition of The Literature of American Aboriginal Languages (1857), written by Hermann E. Ludewig. For the next three decades, Trübner continued to build a powerful reputation in the two related fields of philological scholarship and international publishing.

Trübner's scholarship was closely related to the business interest. William Heinemann observed:
Nicholas Trübner was the friend and adviser of all who were engaged in the study of oriental literature. His firm during this period has been the intermediary between Europe and the East. His agents are scattered all over the globe, and they send from the remotest parts the literary productions of every people of the world to London. Here they are catalogued and carefully described, and Trübner's Record makes them widely known among librarians and scholars. (Mumby, 166–7)
The monthly periodical Trübner's American and Oriental Literary Record (1865–91) was widely used by scholars of Asian literatures. In 1878 he launched Trübner's Oriental Series, which eventually numbered about fifty volumes. The series was supported by the India Office Library where the editor, E. Reinhold Rost, was employed. Another link to the colonial service was forged when Trübner became the supplier of reference books and periodicals to government bureaux. William R. Greg, controller of the Stationery Office, was also the author of Enigmas of Life (1872–9), published in Trübner's series the English and Foreign Philosophical Library. Serving as bookseller, agent, and publisher to nearly fifty government departments and learned societies in England, the United States, Australia, Denmark, and Sweden, as well as holding the agency to supply about thirty libraries around the world, Trübner developed and managed a network of government and scholarly contacts; his role in maintaining the fabric of empire in the mid-nineteenth century would repay further investigation.

In addition to its specialization in imported literature, Trübner's firm operated as a general publisher, publishing (on a commission basis) four of the novels of Charles Read between 1858 and 1861 and The Breitmann Ballads (1871) of the American writer Charles Godfrey Leland. It was also Samuel Butler's publisher at an important juncture in the novelist's career, bringing out Erewhon in 1871 after it had been rejected by Chapman and Hall. There was a dispute with Butler over the terms for Life and Habit (1878), but he later returned to Trübner and remained until the firm's reorganization in 1889. Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia (1879), a book of Indian lore in blank verse, was another enormously popular title for the firm.

Although he had many friends and exerted a remarkable influence in the London literary world, Trübner's international interests set him apart from others in the book trade. John Camden Hotten remarked in 1868 that, although Trübner was ‘a capital fellow, brimful of linguistic talent’, he nevertheless retained ‘an eye reverent to literary journals and powerful critics’ (Chatto and Windus letter-book).

Trübner died in London on 30 March 1884, aged sixty-six. Latterly his business partners had been Edward Hanson and Frederick Düffing. With his widow, Marie Cornelia Claire Catherine Trübner (the daughter of Joseph Octave Delepierre, Belgian consul in London), they sold the business in 1889 to the new firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, which amalgamated Trübner & Co. with two other companies, Kegan Paul, Trench, and George Redway.

Leslie Howsam
(Trübner, Nicholas (1817–1884),” Leslie Howsam in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article, accessed September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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