Siegfried Lukatis on Insel Bucherei, the iconic German book series

Siegfried Lokatis is a retired professor of book history, and former head of the University of Leipzig's​ Institute for Communication and Media Studies. He is the author of Book ​Covers of the GDR and is currently working on a history of the S. Fischer publishing house, due out in 2026.

We met in Leipzig recently where Siegfried treated me to a tour of ​t​he Bibliotop's splendid Insel Bucherei book collection.

Founded in 1912, the series now ​contains some 2,000 titles (and still counting according to Jonathan Landgrebe, head of Suhrkamp Verlag, the company that today produces the books). The series is iconic in Germany and in many ways its publishing history reflects the history of the country. The books are known for their beauty and the care with which they're produced. Qualities include: individual typographical design, exquisite illustration (notably from the thirties - stay tuned) and photography, and printing on wood-free, age-resistant paper, plus they're thread-stitched and bound in decorative cover paper.​ They served as the model for Allen Lane's King Penguin series.

The Insel Bucherie series includes both well-known and little known texts from world literature as well as art history, non-fiction, poetry, and fairy tales, plus gift anthologies from Germany and around the ​globe.

Subjects covered in my conversation with Siegfried include Rilke and copyright, ​the decision to publish​ established, versus contemporary works; Stephan Zweig and the Nazis, poisonous mushrooms, the rarest volume, the Allied bombing of Leipzig, censorship, the separation of East and West Germany, wartime profits, collecting, pornography and more.