De Gruyter Brill

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  De Gruyter Brill is a German scholarly publishing house, and its family tree begins with a royal sentence. In 1749, Frederick the Great gave the Königliche Realschule in Berlin a privilege. The school could open a bookstore and use it "to publish good and useful books". That modest permission eventually grew into a house devoted to academic literature. The company is now known as De Gruyter Brill, and for years before that it simply went by De Gruyter. How did a school bookshop turn into a publisher of scholarly classics? What happened to the grand building where it worked, and to the firm itself, during a world war? And how did a business assembled from so many older houses end up with a second name?

  952

• 2. Reimer and the Palace

  ›

  Georg Reimer, who lived from 1776 to 1842, took over the school's bookstore in 1800. From 1817 it traded as the Reimer'sche Buchhandlung, while the school's own press eventually became the Georg Reimer Verlag. Reimer built a reputation on the German romantics. His list carried the works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Heinrich von Kleist. In 1816, Reimer began using a representative palace at Wilhelmstraße 73 in Berlin as both family home and publishing house. Its wings held his print shop and press, so books were literally made beside the family's living quarters. The same building later became the Palace of the Reich President. By the 1890s the hundred-year-old firm needed a new owner, and a young man from Ruhrort was about to arrive.

  6923

• 3. Walter de Gruyter Builds an Empire

  ›

  Walter de Gruyter was born in Ruhrort in 1862 and took a position at the Reimer Verlag in 1894. Only three years later, in 1897, he was sole proprietor. He was 35 years old. He then bought four other publishing houses: Göschen, Guttentag, Trübner and Veit. In 1919 he merged them into a single firm, the Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger Walter de Gruyter & Co. Its home was Genthiner Straße in Berlin, and the company is still headquartered there today. The four houses covered philosophy, theology, German literature, medicine, mathematics, engineering, law, political science and natural science. Many classics in those fields still define the publisher's reputation. When de Gruyter died in 1924, he had built one of the largest modern publishing houses in Europe. His son-in-law Herbert Cram, who lived from 1893 to 1967, took over management, and the company remains family-owned.

  95236

• 4. Ruins and a Licence

  ›

  Bombing in the Second World War tore the roof and top floor off the de Gruyter building. Water flooded the basement warehouse, yet the structure itself stood. Remarkably quickly, the firm got back to work. On the 14th of May 1945, it registered to trade again. It became the first publisher in the British zone to receive a licence. Decades later, in 2012, the company took the legal name Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Today Berlin is only one address among several. The publisher also keeps offices in Munich, Vienna, Basel, Warsaw, Boston and Beijing. Some of those cities were already tied to the firm through the houses it had absorbed.

  98235

• 5. A Collection of Imprints

  ›

  In 1977, de Gruyter bought Mouton Publishers of The Hague. The imprint, later called De Gruyter Mouton, specializes in linguistics and issues journals, research monographs, reference works, multimedia publications and bibliographies. Next came K. G. Saur Verlag of Munich in 2006. It kept the name De Gruyter Saur and focuses on reference information for libraries. In 2011, the company took over the journals of Berkeley Electronic Press. The year 2012 brought Birkhäuser, which was acquired after it filed for bankruptcy protection. In 2013, two academic publishers moved over from Cornelsen Verlag: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag and Akademie Verlag. A further purchase followed in 2019, when Jovis Verlag joined the group. One more 2012 acquisition pointed the publisher toward a very different model of sharing research.

  913121920

• 6. Open Access and Long Projects

  ›

  Versita, an open access publisher, joined De Gruyter in 2012. From 2014 until 2018, it was fully folded into an imprint called De Gruyter Open. That imprint hosted several mega journals and a blog called OpenScience, which discussed open access in academia. Both reflected growing enthusiasm for open access among researchers and academic institutions. In 2018, De Gruyter Open was relaunched under the name Sciendo. The publisher was also one of thirteen to join the Knowledge Unlatched pilot. That project was a global library consortium approach to paying for open access books. Alongside these experiments, De Gruyter takes on major long-term scholarly undertakings. One is the complete critical edition of the works of Christoph Martin Wieland.

  1314151721

• 7. Becoming De Gruyter Brill

  ›

  In October 2023, an announcement landed that would change the firm's name. De Gruyter would buy the Dutch publisher Brill for €51.1 million. The two would form a new company, De Gruyter Brill. The plan was to complete the deal by the second quarter of 2024. The company had been known simply as De Gruyter until 2024, when its operations merged with those of Brill Publishers. The new name carries a German pronunciation, roughly də ˈɡʁɔʏtɐ, for its first half. A royal bookstore privilege from 1749 had become, nearly three centuries later, a partnership across two countries.

  1145