| In
his popular book The Germans (1982), Stanford historian Gordon
Craig remarked: "When German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth
century talked of living in a Frederican age, they were sometimes
referring not to the monarch in Sans Souci, but to his namesake, the
Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai." Such was the importance attributed
to Nicolai's role in the intellectual life of his age by his own contemporaries.
While long neglected by students of the period, who tended to accept
the caricature of him as a philistine who failed to recognize Goethe's
genius, Nicolai has experienced a resurgence of interest among scholars
reexploring the German Enlightment and the literary marketplace
of the eighteenth century.
This book, drawing upon Nicolai's large unpublished correspondence,
rounds out the picture we have of Nicolai already as author and
critic by focusing on his roles as bookseller and publisher and
as an Aufkärer in the book trade. |
|
|
