Winning the Continent

This chapter focuses on Albatross Press's efforts to win the European continent, including the increasingly nationalistic German market. On February 15, 1932, flying in the face of the economic turmoil raging in Europe, Albatross began with optimism. In a half-page advertisement in the Börsenblatt, the firm introduced the first six volumes of the Albatross Modern Continental Library to booksellers in the German-speaking world. Evidently, the exhausting work of the previous year had come to fruition: securing funding, testing printers, creating a look for the series, selecting the titles, and persuading authors, agents, and publishers to throw over Bernhard Tauchnitz for Albatross. This chapter examines how Albatross, led by Max Christian Wegner, Kurt Enoch, and John Holroyd-Reece, pursued a modern agenda that trespassed on the terrain of the British publishing establishment.