Founded 1961 | ||
The Verlag Harri Deutsch (VHD, HD) with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as in Zürich and Thun, Switzerland, was a German publishing house founded in 1961 and closed in 2013.
Contents
Overview
The Verlag Harri Deutsch with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, was a German publishing house founded in 1961 as a spin-off of the scientific bookstore Fachbuchhandlung Harri Deutsch (FHD), which had existed for about a decade earlier. Both were situated near Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Between 1963 and about 1979 the publisher also had an office in Zürich. Around 1974 another dependance was opened in Thun.
The company's activities focussed mostly on textbooks and encyclopedic works in the areas of mathematics, physics, chemistry and other sciences and technologies, in the first three decades in particular titles licensed from publishers of the former Eastern Bloc including the East-German publishers Edition Leipzig, BSB B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, VEB Bibliographisches Institut, VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, the Russian publisher Nauka (Наука) and others. The publications, some of which came in colored plastic soft covers, were popular also for their often very affordable prices.
In 1997, Martin Kegel took over the active management of the company. After the death of the founder Harri Deutsch in 2000, the Swiss dependance Verlag Harri Deutsch AG went into liquidation on 2000-10-26 and was dissolved on 2002-08-22. The German Harri Deutsch GmbH was reorganized into the Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Harri Deutsch GmbH on 2001-01-19 under Kegel's lead. With no successor in sight it stopped its business activities on 2013-05-31 in order to prepare for Kegel's retirement later that year. Selected stock and publishing rights were transferred to the German publisher Europa-Lehrmittel.
In a parallel development, the bookstore was sold off to the Heymanns group, Cologne, on 2001-01-01 as Buchhandlung Harri Deutsch GmbH, which went into insolvency and was taken over by Fachbuch Mediasales GmbH & Co. KG in Gladenbach in 2004. When this became insolvent as well in 2006, the bookstore was refounded by Kegel as Wissenschaftliche Verlagsbuchhandlung Harri Deutsch GmbH on 2007-03-08 until it was finally closed on 2013-08-22.
Selected publications
One of the publisher's bestsellers was Taschenbuch der Mathematik (A Guide Book to Mathematics, Handbook of Mathematics). Originally this work by the Russians Bronstein and Semendjajew was translated and edited by Viktor and Dorothea Ziegler and Günter Grosche for the East-German publisher BSB B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft. Some contingents of the East German print runs were dedicated for Verlag Harri Deutsch who had obtained a license from Teubner for distribution of the title in Western countries. Following licensing problems resulting from market environmental and legal changes caused by the German reunification, the title was reworked by Gerhard Musiol and Heiner Mühlig now based on the latest non-Teubner influenced Russian edition and independently produced by Verlag Harri Deutsch.
The Taschenbuch der Physik (literally: Pocketbook of physics) by Horst Kuchling was another bestseller licensed from VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig.
Another highly regarded title, licensed from the East-German VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, was Vladimir Ivanovich Smirnov's seven-volume work Lehrgang der höheren Mathematik (A Course in Higher Mathematics).