Everyone Wants to Be a Tauchnitz: The Fight over Paperbacks in English in Post-war Europe

In 1945, publishers in Western Europe looked forward to an era free of censorship and press restrictions enacted during Nazi occupation. Yet the post-war peace offered existential challenges, ones that can be seen in the failed attempts of the Tauchnitz and Albatross publishing houses to regain their previous dominance in the market. Both firms imagined a future bright with possibility in the late 1940s, selling English books in a free continental market hungry for Anglo-American literature. Yet as the correspondence of Albatross’s Dutch partner, Sijthoff, after the war documents, post-war Europe instead presented continental editions publishers with a host of intractable problems: from paper shortages, to governmental regulations, to upstart American publishers eager to flood Europe with cheap paperbacks. Ironically, then, it wasn’t war, but the peace that would pose the greatest existential threat to Sijthoff, Albatross, and Western Europe’s other continental publishers of books in English.