(FNHUW'RVVLHUV /DUV0OOHU %ULWLVKDQG*HUPDQ7H[WERRN3XEOLVKHUV $*XLGHWR$UFKLYH&ROOHFWLRQV 'LHVH3XEOLNDWLRQZXUGHYHU|IIHQWOLFKWXQWHUGHUFUHDWLYHFRPPRQV/L]HQ] 1DPHQVQHQQXQJ.HLQH%HDUEHLWXQJ8QSRUWHG &&%<1' KWWSFUHDWLYHFRPPRQVRUJOLFHQVHVE\QG Eckert. Dossiers Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research ISSN 2191-0790 Volume 12 (2017) Editors Nicola Watson, Tim Hartung and Victoria Schnitker Form for referencing: Müller, Lars. British and German Textbook Publishers: A Guide to Archive Collections. Eckert. Dossiers 12 (2017). urn:nbn:de:0220‐2017‐0162. British and German Textbook Publishers: A Guide to Archive Collections 3 Introduction Lars Müller Historic research is predominantly dependent upon access to source materials. The archives of textbook publishers contain material that has great potential for innovative new studies, but research in this area is hindered by a lack of access to these sources and by their great disparity. This archive guide aims to redress this situation. It provides brief information about existing archive collections and can act as a starting point for locating source material. In addition it represents the hope that the increasing interest in archive-based research into textbooks and educational materials will stimulate new research. Existing studies using archive material from textbook publishers have tended to focus on individual publishing houses meaning that international comparative analyses are a significant desideratum of research in this field. This archive guide primarily provides information about German and British textbook publishers. Defining which publishing houses fall into those categories is complicated by two main factors. The first of these is that many publishing houses were, and still are, international companies producing textbooks for diverse countries and regions; either through subsidiaries or agreements with local publishers. This guide bases its entries on the country in which the headquarters of each publisher is or was based. This means that archives such as the Oxford University Press (OUP) contain interesting material on textbooks from countries other than the two in our study and that the publisher Dent is included in the guide even though its archive collection is located in the USA, as it was originally a British company. The variations in the definition of what constitutes a ‘textbook’ present the second complicating factor. In some countries regulatory requirements can be used as an indicator to differentiate between ‘textbooks’ and complementary teaching materials but in others the difference is considerably more difficult to ascertain. When selecting which publishers to include we worked with a broad understanding of the term ‘textbook’ and have incorporated producers of books for use in schools. There is therefore an entry for the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (German Federal Agency for Civic Education), which has been producing teaching materials since the 1950s that are not subject to the specific regulations applicable to textbooks. A next step to expand this guide to archive collections could be to cover collections from textbook publishers in other countries in order to encourage international comparative studies. Equally it would be worthwhile covering producers of other educational media for schools, such as educational films, maps or school radio. There are many urn:nbn:de:0220-2017-0162 Eckert. Dossiers 12 (2017) British and German Textbook Publishers: A Guide to Archive Collections 4 possibilities for comparative research for example: examining the market positioning of such publishers, or the production of educational material in a range of media, or the effect of different conditions, such as approval regulations etc. A review of the available material reveals the disparate distribution of the archive collections. This situation is owed in part to the fact that the publishers listed here are predominantly in the private sector and it is therefore entirely their decision whether to maintain their archives and how. A handful of publishing houses deemed their own history important enough to establish a dedicated archive and even, in the case of OUP or Westermann for example, to employ their own archivist. Unfortunately we discovered that there is no longer any archive material available for a great number of textbook publishing houses in Great Britain and Germany. Material was disposed of over time as state regulated deadlines for maintaining records expired; either due to lack of space, knowledge of archiving or appreciation of their own company history. Sometimes material was lost during relocations/mergers/acquisitions/business closures/etc. In Germany particularly some archive collections were destroyed during the Second World War. Surviving collections have been entrusted to a broad range of repositories: municipal, state, regional and national archives, as well as economic and university archives hold documents from textbook publishers. Collections are therefore widely distributed and subject to varying access restrictions. In Great Britain, however, the University of Reading has created the Archive of British Publishing and Printing, which has established itself as a centre for archive material from many textbook publishers such as: Georg Allen & Unwin, George Bell& Sons Ltd, the Longman Group, Macmillan and Co. Ltd and numerous others. No such centre exists in Germany although the Bayerische Wirtschaftsarchiv in Munich holds archive files for C.C. Buchner and Oldenbourg, two significant textbook publishers. In addition to traditional archives we should mention the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records (SAPPHIRE). The aim of this project is to document and research the social, economic and cultural history of the print and publishing industry, which was enormously influential in Scotland during the twentieth century (Finkelstein, Bromage, McCleery 2002; http://www.sapphire.ac.uk/). The scope and orientation of existing archive collections for the textbook publishers included in this guide also vary greatly. Our research into the GDR’s national publishing house, Volk und Wissen, revealed a comprehensive archived collection and companies such as OUP and Westermann have exceptionally good resources available to researchers, yet others such as the Pädagogischen Verlag Berthold Schultz, who published Wege der Völker (Paths urn:nbn:de:0220-2017-0162 Eckert. Dossiers 12 (2017) British and German Textbook Publishers: A Guide to Archive Collections 5 of Nations), one of the most influential history textbooks of the fledging Federal Republic, only has an archive consisting of some 30 to 40 pages and the majority of those relate to the bankruptcy and insolvency proceedings in the 1950s and 1960s1. During this project we wrote entries for 33 publishing houses in Germany and 31 in Britain. These entries are organised alphabetically according to country. The information is arranged according to a standard template and primarily provides an overview of the archive collections. Each entry begins with a short company history, which also refers to the specific focus of the publishing house. While some publishers concentrated exclusively on the textbook market others divided their activities between general and education markets or only produced one or two textbooks during their entire history. The company history is followed by Archive and Inventory Information; this details the location of the archive, the time span and scope of the collection as well as its primary focus. Further information is provided by the section listing Company Chronicles and Secondary Literature. The companies’ individual histories can be a rich source of information and provide an insight into where each company positioned itself within its respective market2. Finally, each entry contains Contact Details of the corresponding archive and a Link to [the] online catalogue, where available. The data should above all provide a starting point for further research. The information in the archive guide was up-to-date at the end of 2016. We have attempted to present as comprehensive an overview as possible of the publishing company archives in both countries but make no assertion that the archive is complete. Our research took several forms. Firstly we scrutinised relevant literature in order to locate the archive collections and then referred to existing archive guides; to corporate archives for example3. Another method was to identify applicable publishing houses4 and write directly to those still operating, or to search regional, municipal, corporate or state archives to trace the archive 1 Berlin-Brandenburgisches Wirtschaftsarchiv e.V., K 1/1/6675, see corresponding entry in archive guide. 2 As celebratory and anniversary publications may be published as grey literature, they are generally difficult to find through library searches. However, the Wirtschaftsarchiv at the University of Cologne Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences holds a collection of such texts. For information contact Martina Maasjosthusmann (maasjosthusmann(at)wiso.uni-koeln.de). See also http://www.wirtschaftsarchiv.uni-koeln.de/en/startseite/. 3 Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte e.V.: Deutsche Wirtschaft-Archiv. Nachweis historischer Quellen in Unternehmen, Körperschaften des öffentlichen Rechts (Kammern) und Verbänden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Köln: Franz Steiner Verlag 1994 (3 Vols.). 4 As mentioned above identifying