Velhagen & Klasing

Übersichtskarte von Afrika, 1886 (published in Andree's Allgemeiner Handatlas, 1887)

Velhagen & Klasing's first major success was the popular cookbook of Henriette Davidis from 1844 to 1875.[1][2] The company earned 2,762 Thaler in the cookbook's peak sales year in 1858,[2] or the equivalent of over US$40,000 in 2021.[3] Davidis argued fiercely with the company over her compensation, and her royalty payment increased from 50 to 1000 Thaler over its publication history.[1]

In the 1870s and 1880s, Velhagen & Klasing sold two-thirds of its Lutheran and patriotic works through Colporteur salesmen, at the time a new method of marketing through door-to-door salesmen.[4][lower-alpha 1]

Another area that Velhagen & Klasing emphasized was geography textbooks. In this area, Ferdinand Hirt, who published Ernst von Seydlitz's works, was their major competitor.[5] In the mid-to-late 1800s, Hirt & Sohn[lower-alpha 2] and Velhagen & Klasing together had an oligopoly in the German textbook market.[6][7]

Velhagen & Klasing was also dominant in popular children's literature.[8] Their popular novels for girls in this era conveyed largely the same values as their schoolbooks, namely virtue, piety, self-sacrifice, and docility.[8]

In the late nineteenth century, Velhagen & Klasing published a number of very popular adventure novels by S. Wörishöffer.[9][10] She was hired by Velhagen & Klasing to rewrite an unsuccessful novel by a previously unpublished writer, Max Bischoff, which resulted in Robert des Schiffsjungen (1877).[9][11] The publisher intentionally hid the identity of Wörishöffer, who was not the world traveling male that the novels implied, in order to preserve their credibility.[10]

In 1886, they began publishing the illustrated family monthly, Velhagen & Klasing's Monatshefte, which included reviews by Carl Hermann Busse.[12]

In 1901, they bought the publishing company of Georg Wilhelm Ferdinand Müller (1806–1875) from his heirs. Müller's work consisted primarily of textbooks.[13]

The publisher had significant involvement in the Leipzig Geographical Society, known as Geographischer Abend.[14]

When World War I caused a redrawing of national boundaries, some publishers, such as Columbus Verlag of Berlin, began developing geographical maps which ignored territorial boundaries. Velhagen & Klasing rejected this shift and focused on territorial boundaries.[15] Velhagen & Klasing published the second most popular school atlas in Germany in the 1920s, after the one made by Carl Diercke.[16] Their atlases in this era were examples of cartographic propaganda intentionally designed to promote German nationalism,[17] as had their other textbooks since the nineteenth century.[18] The trend to expand the borders of Germany and German cultural influence in Velhagen & Klasing's maps began in the late 1920s, and by 1933 their maps contained large-scale falsifications.[19]

Velhagen & Klasing was one of many who profited from the closure of Jewish and left-wing publishing companies during the Nazi Party's rise to power in the 1930s.[20]