Buchfrauen

The book industry is female. Around 80 percent of those employed in the German book market today are women: they publish, produce, design, and sell books. Edda Ziegler demonstrates that they have been doing this not just since the beginning of the last century, with her history of women in the book trade and publishing. The history of the German book trade is largely the history of men—women appear for a long time only as exceptions and peripheral figures. This book places them— for the first time in book historiography— at the center of events. Ziegler describes, in overview chapters on the respective historical situations and in portraits of well-known female publishers, editors, agents, and booksellers, the opportunities and obstacles of women's professional activity in the German-speaking book market. It is relevant for both academic research and a broad audience.