PROFILE A family firm
Knut Dorn has announced his retirement later this year as senior managing partner and director of sales for the bookseller and subscription agent Harrassowitz. He told Siân Harris about the company’s remarkable history
One of these letters asked for details of the company and its services. These were reasonable questions to expect a potential customer to ask. What was more unusual was that the letter was sent in 1948, soon after the end of World War II, by John Fall, chief of the acquisitions division of the New York Public Library, USA – and that, until its offices were destroyed in the war, Harrassowitz’s headquarters had been in what was to become East Germany. ‘The astonishing fact was that when the
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letter was sent out, Harrassowitz did not yet have an official address and the paperwork that was necessary to register a company at the time with the occupational forces was not yet completed,’ said Dorn, who is the company’s senior managing partner and director of sales. The strong relationship between US libraries
and the book seller and subscription agent Harrassowitz began long before World War II. ‘The USA has always been the main market for us and accounts for around 80 per cent of our business. We started working with Harvard in 1882 and our US contacts survived two world wars,’ said Dorn. Indeed, by the time World War I broke out,
the relationships between the company and its US customers were strong enough that, in 1916, the University of Chicago Library entrusted a blanket order to Harrassowitz to collect war materials, pamphlets, propaganda, ephemeral and fugitive materials for the library.
Building the foundations Harrassowitz was founded in Leipzig in 1872 by Otto Harrassowitz and Oscar Richter under the
20 Research Information AUG/SEP 2011 Knut Dorn HARRASSOWITZ
name Richter & Harrassowitz, Antiquariats und Verlagsbuchhandlung. When the founding partners separated three years later, the business became known as Otto Harrassowitz. Harrassowitz senior was succeeded in the business by his son, Hans Harrassowitz, in 1915.
Leipzig was a good place to be based as it was
one of the major centres of the book world at the time, according to Knut Dorn. ‘Practically any title published anywhere in the world was available in Leipzig due to an incredible system of storehouses that served the trade,’ he explained. ‘I remember my father telling me about the book scouts that were sent out in the morning after the orders came in by mail to pick up the books in the pertinent warehouses so that they would be available in the afternoon for billing and dispatch by the end of the day.’ However, the choice of location proved a challenge as world events developed. With the outbreak of World War II the company continued to ship materials to its international
n the wall of Knut Dorn’s office hangs a collection of letters. The letters are from customers and mark significant points in the history of the company he works for, Otto Harrassowitz.
customers for as long as possible, using routes via Switzerland, Portugal and Bermuda but, once the embargo tightened, standing order and subscription materials were collected and stored in countryside locations until the end of the war. In 1941 war caused further problems for the company as Hans Harrassowitz received an official reprimand for having distributed catalogues that advertised the works of Jewish authors. When overnight bombing in 1943 destroyed Harrassowitz’s offices in Leipzig, along with close to a million volumes of stock, the company continued to operate out of Hans Harrassowitz’s apartment. After the war, the company decided to move its headquarters to West Germany in 1948. ‘By that time it was apparent that an international book company could not be run anymore out of Leipzig in the communist occupation zone that later became East Germany. There were simply too many restrictions on communicating freely with the world,’ explained Dorn. ‘The decision to have Harrassowitz move to the West and to the city of Wiesbaden was greeted enthusiastically by the American librarians, the major customer base of Harrassowitz, and it was their loyalty to the company that helped greatly in getting the Wiesbaden office going.’
A family business When Hans Harrassowitz died in 1964 his wife Gertrud Harrassowitz inherited his share of the company and formed a partnership with the three men who had helped rebuild the business after the war and helped open the new offices in West Germany in 1948. One of these men was Richard Dorn, Knut
Dorn’s father, who joined the business as head of the department serving libraries in China in 1936. Knut Dorn followed in his father’s footsteps in 1964 and was accepted into the partnership and assumed responsibility for library services in 1972. ‘It has always been a family business and is still run by the families of the three partners,’ he said. This has both advantages and disadvantages,
he continued: ‘We are a close-knit group and decisions can be made quickly. There is also a strong sense of commitment, which extends to the staff too,’ he said. ‘However, we are only a
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