The Foundations of Marketing Practice

A history of book marketing in Germany

Ronald Fullerton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317536123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Between 1815 and 1890, the German book market experienced phenomenal growth, driven by German publishers' dynamic entrepreneurial attitude towards developing and distributing books. Embracing aggressive marketing on a large scale, they developed a growing sense of what their markets wanted. This study, based almost entirely upon primary sources including over seventy years of trade newspapers, is an in depth account of how and why this market developed—decades before there was any written theory about marketing.

This book is therefore about both marketing practice and marketing theory. It provides a uniquely well-researched account of how markets were developed in very sophisticated ways long before there was a formal discipline of marketing: for example, German publishers used segmentation at least 150 years before the first US articles on the subject appeared. Much of their experience was also shared by the UK and US book markets through international interactions between booksellers and other businessmen.

All scholars of marketing will find this historical account a fascinating insight into markets and marketing, This will also be of interest to social historians, scholars of German history, book trade and book trade historians.

1
Separate, distinct, both sluggish

The German book markets at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815–1820

As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

(Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621))

At the close of the Napoleonic Wars the German book market was small; the bulk of the German populace had little or no part in it. This was also true of every other country in the world then, but Germany considered itself the “land of poets and thinkers.” Moreover, the traditionalist attitudes and business practices of the book trade and the conservatism of Germany's rulers made it seem unlikely that this situation would ever change.¹ Within a few years new attitudes and practices emerged in parts of the book trade, but immediately following the Napoleonic Wars these were scarce.

Political and religious leaders feared that reading could tempt the masses into moral depravity and political sedition. The dominant mentality in the book trade was a stately passivity, which “tended to respond to needs, but not to rush about awakening them.”² Rarely were more than 1,000 copies of any book printed. The standard edition size was 750 to 1,000 copies, and seldom would the entire edition be sold. More titles were published annually in Germany than in any other country—over 3,000 (including reprints) in 1815, over 4,000 in 1820 (also including reprints)—but the total volume of books sold lagged far behind that of Great Britain and France. About two-thirds of the German titles were scholarly works, which usually sold 500 or fewer copies.³

The great number of titles published every year in Germany was due to factors other than a large book market. Contemporary bookmen often accused authors of crass profligacy; according to the Düsseldorf book dealer J. H. C. Schreiner, for example:

The brazen industry of our writers has now burst all bounds of modesty and decency. … They debase the arts and sciences to acquire money with which to indulge themselves. To job their outrageously high royalties from publishers they concoct: new terminologies, theologies, and systems, all of which serve only to confuse and obfuscate; Romanticism and Mysticism, which ruin good taste and seduce to silly enthusiasms; idiotic fairy tales and nonsense about magnetism, which merely revive superstition; ad nauseam imitations of the [Brockhaus] encyclopedia which only encourage and reward banal pedantry; and political pamphlets, which … merely anger the censors.⁴

But Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, the most perceptive book-man of that age, knew that there was more to it than writers' greed; he knew that publishers themselves often encouraged the flood of books; he knew too that the decentralization of the book trade, a product of the nation's political disunity, contributed to the plethora of titles:

Germany's scribblers write too much and too much of what they write is printed. These excesses are fueled by the fact that there are so many places here which have publishers, in contrast to England and France, where they are confined to London, Edinburgh, and Paris. A result of the German situation is an atmosphere in which the personal connections of would-be authors and the over-accommodation of publishers allow the printing of stacks of manuscripts which, if judged by their scholarly or literary merits, would never find a publisher … Perhaps half the books published in Germany have no chance in the book market; they are stillborn as waste paper.⁵

Offering all of these books to the public were approximately 450 stationary book dealers, most of whom did publishing and retailing, several hundred itinerant book hawkers, or Colporteurs, and a hundred or so binders who sold books as a sideline.⁶ Some binders published too. Taking Colporteurs, binders, and stationary book shops together, I estimate that, had they been equally distributed, there would have been one book retailing unit for each 25,000 to 30,000 people; in actuality, their distribution favored city dwellers. There was one school of thought in the book trade which seriously advocated shrinkage in the number of dealers.⁷

It is not surprising that “more than one book in a rural household was a peculiarity, three to five, a rarity.”⁸ In urban regions too, however, many people neither owned nor read books—many people had no part in the book market. Frankfurt/Main, for example, which impressed the Hamburg publisher Friedrich Perthes with its “lively … trade, its large stocks of both old and new books, and its industrious, clever, and often well-educated bookmen,”⁹ doubtless had a higher incidence of book ownership than many German cities: it was a center of the book trade of Southern and Western Germany and its population was more Protestant than Catholic. Yet in 1800 no books at all had been owned by:

• 73.7 percent of the journeymen artisans
• 71.7 percent of the military personnel
• 71.2 percent of the lower and middle level bureaucrats
• 68.3 percent of the workers
• 65.2 percent of the artisans
• 49.6 percent of the merchants.¹⁰

Members of these groups who did own books usually had only a few, i.e., one to five devotional works; in this category were:

• 15.8 percent of the journeymen artisans
• 15.2 percent of the military personnel
• 16.7 percent of the lower and middle level bureaucrats
• 23.4 percent of the workers
• 23.1 percent of the artisans
• 13.9 percent of the merchants.¹¹

Thus few or no books were owned by:

• 89.5 percent of the journeymen artisans
• 86.9 percent of the military personnel
• 87.9 percent of the lower and middle level government employees
• 91.7 percent of the workers
• 88.3 percent of the artisans
• 65.3 percent of the merchants.¹²

These people composed the overwhelming majority of Frankfurt's population. Although the figures cited are from around 1800, there is no reason to assume that book ownership had increased by 1815. If anything, the economic privations and depressed condition of the book trade during the war years would indicate that it might have decreased.

There can be no doubt that at the close of the Napoleonic Wars more Germans neither owned nor bought books than those who did. Although there is too little precise statistical information available to fix exactly the size of this majority, it must have been overwhelming in the rural areas of Catholic West and South Germany and in those of the eastern reaches of Prussia and of Mecklenburg. On the land in central Prussia, Saxony, and Thuringia the majority would have been somewhat narrower. It would have been narrower yet in urban areas, especially those with cultural and educational institutions. But everywhere in Germany it would have been a majority.¹³

Of the reasons why so many people owned no books, the most important were that many people could not read and that books were expensive. Many Germans were completely illiterate. Even more were functionally illiterate, that is, able perhaps to scrawl some semblance of their names and to recognize a few written words, but not able to read sentences.

Statistics for Prussia, which had the best educational institutions in Germany, drive home the extent of the inability to read. More than 16 percent of the males, and almost 40 percent of the females, born in Prussia between 1821 and 1825 could not sign their names to their marriage contracts.¹⁴ Among people who were adults in the period 1815–1820, and who had therefore been born during the eighteenth century, these percentages were much higher, because school attendance had been much less common during their childhoods.

In 1822, about one-quarter of the school-age children in Prussia did not go to school, the compulsory school attendance law not always being enforced. In 1815 the figure had no doubt been slightly higher. In Berlin in 1818, there were 27,000 children who were supposed to attend school. Six thousand of them did not. Rural areas had much poorer school attendance than urban ones. In both urban and rural regions, more boys than girls went to school.¹⁵

Some idea of the differences in educational levels between Catholics and Protestants can be gotten from 1824 statistics from the Prussian Administrative District of Aachen. There, only slightly more than half—34,140 out of 66,611—of Catholic children attended school, while almost all—l,600 out of 1,852—of Protestant children did.¹⁶ One can imagine what the figures for Catholic Bavaria's school attendance were; unfortunately, none are available.

Most of the children who did go to school received only a very rudimentary education. That was all they were intended to get. Germany's religious, cultural, and political leaders at once feared mass education as a potential source of leveling ideas and rebelliousness and realized that it could bring economic benefits. The solution to the dilemma presented was to educate the masses—in a most limited fashion. Prussia's elementary schools, for example, aimed “not to elevate the artisan or worker above his place in society, but to give him a solid, competent school education.”¹⁷ With such an education he could best fulfill his task within the niche of society into which he had been born. If the graduate of a Prussian elementary school could struggle through a handbook or so for his trade and simple devotional literature for his soul, his schooling had fulfilled its aims. Often the schooling could not meet even these modest goals because the classes were too large, the textbooks inadequate, the teaching methods clumsy, and the teachers sorry, ill-paid wretches. In 1822, in Prussia, there was an average of nearly 70 pupils to each teacher in the elementary schools, and some schools had 200 pupils to a teacher. About two- thirds of the Prussian elementary school teachers were not really paid enough to subsist upon.¹⁸

Only a tiny fraction of children anywhere in Germany got more than an elementary school education, if that. The enrollment figures for the University of Berlin's winter semesters, 1815 to 1820, were:

• 1815 … 336 students
• 1816 … 519 students
• 1817 … 551 students
• 1818 … 610 students
• 1819 … 424 students
• 1820 … 531 students.¹⁹

Berlin was one of the largest German universities.

Most Germans, then, were not educated to be readers. They amused, informed, and edified themselves in other, traditional, ways. That was just as well, for if they had wanted to buy books, they would not have been able to afford them. Books were expensive; they were priced like luxury items in a country where few people had money for luxury items, and where many had difficulties in procuring necessities.²⁰ The two-volume edition of the poet Novalis' works cost 6 Gulde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Introduction the role of marketing in the growth of the German book markets, 1815–1890
• 1 Separate, distinct, both sluggish: the German book markets at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, 1815–1820
• 2 The regular book market explodes, 1820–1843
• 3 Engines of growth: dynamic and entrepreneurial marketing, 1820–1843
• 4 The mass book market, 1820–1870
• 5 The decline and recovery of the regular trade, 1843–1866
• 6 The book market of the regular trade at mid-century, 1843–1866
• 7 Good times, 1867–1888: the middle- and upper-class book market after mid-century
• 8 The mass book market explodes, 1870–1890
• Conclusion: the role of dynamic high capitalist marketing practice in the German book markets
• Index