Scholarship will facilitate the study of the extremely valuable material in the Mainz Publishing Archive at Mainz University
09.01.2012
The publishers Dr. Sabine and Kurt Groenewold, who donated the extensive archives of the Europäische Verlagsanstalt (EVA), the Rotbuch-Verlag, and the Syndikat publishing houses to the Mainz Publishing Archiv at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in 2009, are now helping promote the study of these materials by the university's Institute of Book Studies. Generous scholarships will invite students to use the material archived in Mainz for their Bachelor's, Master's, or doctoral theses. Dr. Sabine Groenewold now presented the first installment worth €30,000 to the Chancellor of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Götz Scholz, and the Director of the JGU Institute of Book Studies, Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel.
"The investigation of the very valuable archive material, which includes publishing house correspondence and manuscripts by Nobel laureates Herta Müller and Dario Fo, will be significantly facilitated thanks to this wonderful scholarship," says the Director of the Institute of Book Studies, Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel. The students now have the unique opportunity to study the author-publisher correspondence, manuscript editing, planning for advertising campaigns, sales, public relations work, and the reviews of published books. "The in-depth exploration of the valuable archived materials is now moving ahead at full speed," Füssel adds. "Several related Master's theses and three dissertations are currently being worked on."
Moreover, Dr. Sabine and Kurt Groenewold and former editors are available for witness reports. "This gives a great chance to the project of writing a history of the book trade in Germany which is the next big focus of the JGU Institute of Book Studies," explains Füssel.
A jury of publishers and academics under the chairmanship of Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel will be responsible for granting these scholarships. Since the three publishing houses along with the Rowohlt publishing house, the archive of which is also located in Mainz, were important players during the upheavals of the late 1960s and after the German reunification in 1989, the donors have requested that projects focusing on this period in history should be preferentially sponsored.