The books the Nazis didn’t burn

For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking to discover Albatross, an unknown imprint from the English literary past. Before Albatross there was Tauchnitz, the Leipzig firm which for 100 years cornered the market in English language books outside the territories of the British Empire and the USA. One often comes across Tauchnitz and I have two of its editions: a Thomas de Quincey, with a stamp from a circulating library in Lausanne; and a Ruskin, with one from a British club in Portugal. I only keep them as curiosities, because normally I avoid Tauchnitz editions: cheap boards with awful print on awful paper. But its market was huge, not only among expats but also foreigners who wished to pursue the new world language, which, following the defeat of Napoleon, was English.

By the time Albatross came along in 1932, Tauchnitz had sold 40 million books since its inauguration in 1837. But Albatross, licensed in the same territories, was soon outselling its predecessor and indeed took over its management, though the two firms remained technically separated. Yet I’ve never seen an Albatross book, which is astonishing, because Albatross stole the Tauchnitz thunder not only by under-cutting on price but by being very attractive visually, and the imprint sold in vast numbers.

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The Albatross Modern Continental Library pioneered the paperback market — Penguin, learning much from it, started out in 1935. Albatross invented colour-coding, in the form of fully saturated covers: red for crime, blue for romance, yellow for literary novels and essays, purple for biography and history, green for travel, orange for short stories.