Cotta (publishing house)

Johann Friedrich, Freiherr Cotta von Cottendorf (April 27, 1764 – December 29, 1832) was a German publisher, industrial pioneer and politician.

Cotta is the name of a family of German publishers, intimately connected with the history of German literature. The Cottas were of noble Italian descent, and at the time of the Reformation the family was settled in Eisenach in Thuringia.

Johann Georg Cotta (1631–1692), the founder of the publishing house of J. G. Cotta, married in 1659 the widow of the university bookseller, Philipp Braun, in Tübingen, and took over the management of his business, thus establishing the firm which was subsequently associated with Cotta's name. On his death, in 1692, the undertaking passed to his only son, also name Johann Georg; and on his death in 1712, to the latter's eldest son, also named Johann Georg, while the second son, Johann Friedrich, became a distinguished theologian.

Although the eldest son of the third Johann Georg, Christoph Friedrich Cotta (1730–1807), established a printing-house to the court at Stuttgart, the business languished.

It was reserved to the youngest son of Christoph Friedrich, Johann Friedrich, to restore the fortunes of the firm. Born in Stuttgart, he attended the gymnasium of his native place, and was originally intended to study theology. He, however, entered the university of Tübingen as a student of mathematics and law, and after graduating spent a considerable time in Paris, studying French and natural science, and mixing with distinguished literary men. After practising as an advocate in one of the higher courts, Cotta, in compliance with his father's earnest desire, took over the publishing business at Tübingen. He began in December 1787, and laboured incessantly to acquire familiarity with all the details. From 1793 to 1794, Orell Füssli in Zürich published Marianne Ehrmann's Die Einsiedlerinn aus den Alpen, the first magazine that was published by a women in Switzerland; her early death stopped the further issues. Because the self-publishing could not handle the success of her former magazine, Marianne and her husband agreed on a takeover by Cotta, but in 1793 occurred irreconcilable conflicts; Cotta founded the journal Flora with the subscriber base, and Marianne Ehrmann continued the magazine Einsiedlerinn aus den Alpen. The house connexions rapidly extended; and, in 1794, the Allgemeine Zeitung, of which Schiller was to be editor, was planned. Schiller was compelled to withdraw on account of his health; but his friendship with Cotta deepened every year, and was a great advantage to the poet and his family. Cotta awakened in Schiller so warm an attachment that, as Heinrich Döring tells us in his life of Schiller (1824), when a bookseller offered him a higher price than Cotta for the copyright of Wallenstein, the poet firmly declined it, replying “Cotta deals honestly with me, and I with him.” In 1795 Schiller and Cotta founded the Horen, a periodical very important to the student of German literature. The poet intended, by means of this work, to infuse higher ideas into the common lives of men, by giving them a nobler human culture, and “to reunite the divided political world under the banner of truth and beauty.” The Horen brought Goethe and Schiller into intimate relations with each other and with Cotta; and Goethe, while regretting that he had already promised Wilhelm Meister to another publisher, contributed the Unterhaltung deutscher Ausgewanderten, the Roman Elegies and a paper on Literary Sansculottism. Fichte sent essays from the first, and the other brilliant German authors of the time were also represented. In 1798 the Allgemeine Zeitung appeared at Tübingen, being edited first by Posselt and then by Huber. Soon the editorial office of the newspaper was transferred to Stuttgart, in 1803 to Ulm, and in 1810 to Augsburg; it is now in Munich.

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