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In the 19th came the industrialization, and with it the pauperization of workers everywhere. Victor Hugo wrote so heart-wrenchingly about their misery in his social novel Les Misérables that the story still lures millions of musical-goers to the theaters today.

A society which knows no god is a brutal society. At least that is what von Horváth’s novel claims. Alluding to Nazi Germany, it shows how one’s own survival trumps humanity, and cowardice wins against civic courage.

The novel did not make much of an impact after its publication in the late 1920s. Until it was rediscovered in the 1960s and became the Bible of the hippie movement. How Hesse distilled the spirit of an entire generation into one book.

Once upon a time, there lived two brothers by the name of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They set out to collect all the fairytales the people up and down the country would tell them. After all, it would be a shame if they were lost because no one had bothered to write them down…

As a child, you can hardly wait to be a grown-up. Owning your own money, eating as many sweets as you want and staying up late! And what do grown-ups dream of? Their childhood of course. To escape from their boring everyday lives, back to a childish fantasy world, without work or duties…

Good literature can create new mental images in your mind and connect things that you have never seen in connection before. Imagine this, for instance: Money is like language. And language is like money. Intrigued? Then read on…

Can we really ever start over in life? Invent ourselves anew? Or will our past, our mistakes, our failure always be with us? These are the questions Max Frisch asks in „I’m Not Stiller”- a novel that will make him world famous.

Many factors play a role in choosing a partner: looks, status, education, money. Of course ideally your other half has it all. But what if you have to choose? This novel zooms in on the family and marriage politics of the bourgeoisie in Berlin around 1900.

Flaubert’s novel tells the story of common folks, just like you and me, and their common struggles: unhappy marriage, extramarital affair, shopping addiction. Nothing that would shock readers – at least not readers in the 21st century, that is.

„Diamonds are a girl’s best friends,” Marilyn Monroe sang in 1949, but the idea that women want to be impressed by money is much older. The tragic story of Jay Gatsby, which glitters with real and fake gold, shows that this strategy doesn’t always succeed.

Literary history is populated by extraordinary heroes, odysseys, and battles. George Eliot, by contrast, pays homage to ordinary, average people, their worries and problems. Because it is these ordinary, small people, after all, who together make up the big wide world.

It’s the time of the Cold War. The cultural imaginary is populated by mad scientists, nuclear physicists, and villains, from James Bond’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Friedrich Dürrenmatt brings the question of the responsibility of science in these times to the theater stage.

It’s the high school reunion of your worst nightmares. A newly rich billionaire returns to the small town of her childhood and presents the townsfolk with an ultimatum: Either they kill one of their own or the old lady will financially ruin the town.

Two things Joseph Conrad equally loved equally were being at sea and writing. Based on his own experiences, he tells stories of far-away islands, typhoons, the impenetrable African jungle, steamship expeditions on the Congo river, and mutinies at sea.

Going on pilgrimage is a pious enterprise but, let’s be honest, also a boring one. To combat the boredom, the travelers in Geoffrey Chaucer’s monumental work launch a storytelling competition. Who tells the most entertaining story? Nun, knight, or doctor?

What’s the price for a human life? How much would it take for you to go to war? The biography of the Swiss farmer Ulrich Bräker shows: Human life was cheap during the Seven Years’ War – just like the mercenaries’ pay.

The opposite of love is not hate but indifference – as Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights shows. Because their love cannot be, two lovers destroy each other until the bitter end, in this depressing but beautifully atmospheric novel.

Ungrateful daughters and betrayed fathers: an old topos in world literature. Just like Shakespeare’s King Lear, Balzac’s Old Goriot has to learn the hard way what it means when his daughters take away everything you own. Until you end up emptyhanded.

Jane Austen is sometimes devalued as “women’s literature”: sentimental, touchy-feely love stories, you know. In Victorian England, however, critics thought her not feminine enough. Why such categorizations are silly and Jane Austen’s novels sentimental only in the best way.

We know Andersen above all as the creator of the little mermaid. Yet he wrote a plethora of other fairytales for children, full of magic and grace. Why reading the Danish poet today is still worth it.

How do you survive a plague? Right, by fleeing the locus of the epidemic outbreak as fast as you can. Which is exactly what the rich and beautiful in Boccaccio’s Decameron do. And to pass the time, the take turns telling each other stories.

In the age of Wikipedia, with thousands of people contributing from all over the world, it is hard to imagine how someone could single-handedly compile 20-volume lexicons. Leus Swiss Lexicon is just that: a giant effort to write the biggest, most comprehensive lexicon of its time.

How can you teach people to good and kind to each other? Perhaps best by showing negative examples for a deterrent effect. That’s exactly what an 18th-century satirical etiquette book did presenting rules on how (not!) to treat other people.

If you’ve read 1984, you know how easy it is to falsify the past. But this knowledge is nothing new. For centuries, rulers paid historians (and some still do) to create an embellished version of the past and the relevant sources, until the Maurists got wise to them.

In 1581, the Froschauer publishing house in Zurich created a complete edition of all works written by Huldrych Zwingli. And there was a good reason for it – which was directly linked to the circumstances of the death of the Zurich reformer in 1531.

Already during his lifetime Luther was the Protestant equivalent of a saint. All the words of wisdom he is said to have shared on all sorts of events have been written down for posterity by his followers. Johannes Aurifaber published all of it as “Luther’s Table talk, with his very own agenda.

Only a few books have such a spectacular transmission history as the works of Tacitus. Their story begins with thefts in German monasteries. However, the author only became truly appealing when the Reformation had created a new national German identity.

A mediocre French author writes mediocre poems about spring and love. But even though his beloved is a prostitute, his literary kisses are rather chaste.

In the 17th century, Amsterdam was Europe’s number-one city for scientific research. One of the city’s great minds was the brilliant physician Gerhard Blasius, one of the co-founders of comparative anatomy. And, typically enough, his last book was a handbook of animal anatomy.

There is no war that shaped Germany more than the conflict between the emperor and the empire that went down in history as the Thirty Years’ War. The fact that Germany is a federal republic now can be traced back to this war – and to the peace that put an end to it.

Sometimes the world changes for the better, at least a little bit. This happens whenever brave people realise that only because something has been done for centuries doesn’t make it right. But how is it possible to make a lasting change?

Centuries-old prejudices against Islam were softened when a French diplomat translated the Quran into his native language in 1647. Soon, many European intellectuals were studying the text. They learned that the faith that had been demonized for so long was on a par with Christianity – a revelation that was a milestone for the Enlightenment. But why was a French diplomat, of all people, the first to translate the Quran into a modern language?

Voltaire used the judicial murder of the French Protestant Jean Calas in order to persuade intellectuals throughout Europe to follow his line of uncompromising tolerance. However, some fell victim to this campaign. We present the book of one of those victims.

World history is the succession of four great empires. This view was widely accepted until the 18th century and is based on a vision of the prophet Daniel. Nobody canonized this worldview as effectively as the Reformation scholar Johannes Sleidanus did.

In the world of ancient mythology it’s easy to get confused – with all the divine epithets and family relationships. Even Goethe and Schiller had that problem. To find out what they needed to know, they consulted the “Hederich”, the go-to reference work for ancient mythology of the 18th century.

Nowadays, building walls has once again become the political method of choice. But in the early modern period, the introduction of cannons made walls completely obsolete. In books like this one by Daniel Specklin, we can find out how people managed to protect their cities back then.

He is the prototypical old miser, his name synonymous with the expression itself: Ebenezer Scrooge. But what is so terribly wrong with the old man from Dickens’ Christmas Carol anyway?

A concerned author urges the European powers to be wary of the supremacy of Russia. The mind behind this work was Gustav III, King of Sweden, who pursued completely different interests: By expressing concerns about the European balance, he wanted to shake the balance of power in his country.

The Zurich scholar Johann Caspar Lavater argued in his four-volume work “Physiognomic fragments” that it is possible to reveal a person’s character by reading what’s “written all over his face”, as the saying goes. Some scholars mocked him, but he had many followers.

Do you like bibliophile books? Then you have to browse through this work! It shows how complicated printing was before offset printing made publishing books a piece of cake. Gessner’s compendium tells you everything one had to know about creating books in the age of movable type printing.

In the 21st century, marriages result from love matches in large parts of the world. Jane Austen’s popular novels show that this is a relatively recent historical development. After all, their heroines marry not just for love, but usually also for money.

The Reformation had far-reaching implications, also regarding the Catholic Church. The competition of the Protestants pushed the Catholic clergy to do something no saint had ever been able to do before: purifying the Church. In 1566, this reformed Church presented in its catechism what “new believers” were supposed to believe.

Can you imagine the Emperor of China sending Jesuits to the Papal Court to ensure the Catholic mission of China? This happened in the years after 1708. However, the arguments of the Emperor of China were far too reasonable to convince a Pope.

What role does God play in the human conception of the world? Are the natural sciences enough to explain the world’s miracles? That is no new question but a very old one, and also the people of the 18th century were confronted with it. They sought their solution in alchemy.

It’s one of the world’s most performed operas: Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. An artist’s edition draws inspiration from insular illumination, illustrating the text with Celtic motifs.

You could find them everywhere under Christmas trees in Victorian England, even under the Queen’s: ‘gift books,’ published annually in November. On the history of an early book market phenomenon.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) fell victim to his modernity. Why do contemporary philosophers hardly ever talk about his works on political philosophy today? Not because his ideas aren’t good, but, on the contrary, because they are widely accepted! The matter was quite different in his lifetime though.

Hermann Hesse’s biography shows: fame alone does not make you happy. Neither successful books nor the Nobel Prize for Literature saved him from mental illness and broken marriages. But it also demonstrates that the dark sides of our lives can be the greatest source of creativity.

People need rules, written ones and unwritten ones. The latter are of particular importance when it comes to demonstrating whether one is a member of a certain community or not. But how is it possible for newcomers to know these rules? By reading about them. That is to say, someone simply needs to write them down, just as Johann Christian Lünig did in his book on court ceremonial.

A skeleton, as the personification of death, takes people from all the different social classes as dance partners and leads them in a round dance: For centuries, the “Dance of Death” was seen as a reminder that every life must end sometime. In the end, could the ancient Dances of Death still teach us how to lead a good life?

Our image of the Swiss is still strongly influenced by what Friedrich Schiller wrote about William Tell. But how did the German poet know that a noble people lived in the Swiss mountains?

In the past, he was simply called “the” poet: Virgil. But how could someone whose style was so elitist become a figure of folk tales and influence Europe’s literary history like hardly anyone else? In the end, it was all the result of a naive misunderstanding ...

Pierre de Nolhac made Versailles his life’s work. As a conservator, he did everything in his power to thoroughly restore the castle of the French kings. He also wrote numerous books about Versailles. A fine edition of one of these works can be found in our library.

What do cabbages, turnips, strawberries, songbirds and knife grinders have in common? All these things were offered for sale in the streets of London. By singing about them. Today we present to you a collection of the popular verses of 19th century street cries.

Even long before Diana and “Megxit”, scandals and affairs involving the monarchy were a favourite topic of the British. One particularly spectacular case occurred in 1820. A book reports on a trial that was about much more than tabloid gossip.

Jesuit Erasmus Froelich wasn’t just mathematician and curator of the emperor’s coin collection. He also wrote a book, which was way more than a coin catalogue. It was supposed to prove the historical authenticity of one part of the Bible.

There is hardly any other philosopher that is as controversial among the English as Thomas Hobbes. Born as a child prodigy into the chaos of the English Civil War in the 17th century, he fell out with everybody – without disappearing from the picture. Without him, we probably wouldn’t think of ourselves as individuals.

In his monumental work „Utopia,” Thomas More imagines a world which functions entirely without money. If you think that this utopia is presented as an ideal world-to-wish-for and want to protest loudly, don’t worry. “Utopia,” is not meant to represent to an ideal world – rather, it is meant to make us think critically about the world we live in now.

When Ubbo Emmo wrote his now little-known work on Greek constitutions in 1600, it was pure dynamite. It was all about freedom – East Frisia’s authorities groaned, the freedom-loving classes rejoiced.

Beheaded, broken on the wheel, pinched with burning irons – these punishments seem to us inhumane. And yet, they had a purpose at their time. A book from 1720 published on the orders of the Prussian King gives us some hints as to why he believed these brutal punishments were necessary: Two officials had stolen from the royal coin cabinet.

Joseph Scaliger was considered one of the greatest scholars of the 16th century. The committed Protestant was a fierce opponent of the Jesuits. While fighting dissidents on paper and on the field, he became the founder of modern textual criticism.

You end up on a lonely island all by yourself. What do you do? An endlessly fascinating question, which Daniel Defoe’s world famous novel puts to its readers and which has also sparked the interest of economists over time. Learn why in this article.

The tobacco industry is a unique example of the triumph of modern marketing. Thanks to effective advertising, millions of people don’t want to give up nicotine despite being fully aware of the consequences. An early example of such advertising is this book.

When Protestants from Salzburg had to leave their home, a king revealed his keen perception and a pastor saw the opportunity for a bestseller.

Charles Mackay’s book about the greatest errors in human history has been a bestseller since the 19th century. Back then, it was thanks to a clever marketing strategy. Now, it’s because we’re hoping to gain insights into modern financial crises.

In the middle of the 19th c., there were more tourists than residents in Paris – says writer Louis Desnoyers. He and his colleagues portrayed foreigners in Paris with sharp words. The supposedly non-political text is an image of Paris society shortly before the revolution.

In the middle of the Ottoman Wars of the 17th century, Venice conquered the Peloponnese in a swift attack. A Venetian book by publisher Girolamo Albrizzi detailed the peninsula’s military and economic state at the time – and did so very much in the interest of the political regime.

What is a human being? A finely tuned machine that perishes once the heart stops beating? Or is there a divine spark in mankind? Will our soul still be there when our bodies fall dead to the ground? In 1767, a book dealt with this very question – and it became the most widely-read book in Germany at that time.

Luther wasn’t the only German critic of the church. Ulrich von Hutten also voiced criticism, however not in the form of academic papers, but with a sharp quill and in form of elegant Latin poetry that no one had mastered like he did.

At the end of the 18th century, the German states increasingly took over the organisation of the education of midwives with the help of doctors. A manual published with the intention of helping women in case there was no doctor present bears witness to this development.

When princes collected coins, they mostly did this for one of two reasons: to enhance prestige or because they were passionate collectors. Anton Günther II, Count of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen-Arnstadt, did it for both reasons. Nevertheless, he sold his spectacular collection to Gotha.

When Lessing brought his Nathan the Wise to the stage, the public immediately knew who the model for his main character was: the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the most famous German Jew at the time. A Karlsruhe publisher seized the opportunity and printed a pirated edition of his works.

The author of this book wasn’t just anyone: Sylvius Nimrod went to the Thirty Years’ War as a landless nobleman. When the war was over, he had become Duke of Württemberg-Oels. He wrote down everything he learned during the terrifying sieges of the war in this manual of artillery.

Investing money wasn’t exactly his forte. Writing about it was. In his short stories, Mark Twain masterfully pictures American capitalism in the 20th century.

Machiavelli’s works on political philosophy like “The Prince” are still popular and frequently quoted today. Also in late 17th century England his works were in demand – for political considerations.

Whoever published a coin collection used to do so not only for scholarly reasons. Quite the opposite: an extensive coin collection made its owner gain prestige, which could be used for political purposes – that’s what the last members of the Farnese family did.

The almost forgotten civil war epos by Roman prodigy Lucan experienced a renaissance during the Thirty Years’ War. There’s a good reason why Dutchman Hugo Grotius, a pioneer of international law, published an edition of this work.

Our work changes the way we see the world. This essay by Swiss art critic Gotthard Jedlicka is proof of that. When living in Madrid, he did not fall in love with wine and tapas, but with the summer light which set the city ablaze with colors – almost like a painting.

He’s often called the “father of liberalism”: John Locke. His idea about protecting the freedom of the individual as the main duty of the state made its way into the American Declaration of Independence in the form of the famous demand for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Appenzell calendar of the 18th century was something like a cross between BBC Culture and the Daily Mail: an engaging form of mass media to educate peasant communities. It gave readers easy access to the contemporary events of what was, even back then, an increasingly complicated world.

From a Jewish guerrilla fighter to a propaganda writer for the Romans: Flavius Josephus was a fascinating figure of the Roman imperial period. But his ‘Antiquities of the Jews’ became extremely popular in the modern era, as attested by this careful translation of the work into French.

Goethe’s ‘Italienische Reise’ (‘Italian Journey’) is regarded as the work that sparked Germany’s love of Italy, Tuscany, red wine and the Italians’ zest for life. However, this book was no travel guide, but rather a work of self-expression by the ‘Prince of Poets’, as he was known, and the testimony of a burnout-sufferer in search of himself.

Why would a Protestant scholar translate and publish, at his own expense, a work by a Jewish scholar containing all the most important teachings of the Jewish faith? It’s quite simple: to advance his own career. By doing so, Friedrich Wilhelm Bock hoped to secure a professorship.

The title of Johannes Stumpf’s account would translate to “A chronicle of all cities, cantons, and people of the commendable Confederacy and a description of its impressive deeds“ in today’s English. With this work, Christoph Froschauer gave Protestant Switzerland its own history.

Chivalrousness was fashionable at tournaments – those who wrote about these events, on the other hand, often lacked this virtue. Georg Rüxner for example, a herald of the 16th century, showed a very lax approach to the truth in his famous tournament book. But what is a tournament book in the first place?

They have fallen out of fashion - those old prayer books that accompanied the life of their owners just a few generations ago the way smartphones do today. Even though the word “selfie” was not yet known at the time, some prayer books were, in fact, used to immortalize the most important moments in their owners’ lives.

Throughout cultural history money was often associated with vice: gambling addiction, greed, fraud, vanity, hedonism. In his satirical novel, Thackeray brings these ideas to life.

Would you accept money from a generous donor if you knew it came from a criminal source? Maybe you’d have qualms about it – just like Pip, the protagonist in Dickens’ great novel.

Can you imagine a world where every human being has a specific place in the system assigned to one by God that one cannot and must not leave? In his book, Barthélemy de Chasseneuz describes such a rigid wold order. Even though he was anything but a compulsive person...

Even hard work is not always enough to make a living. In their fight for better wages, the coal miners in Zola’s novel go on strike – not without consequences…

The Swiss lawyer Jacques Godefroy studied the Codex Theodosianus for decades. His edition of this compilation of laws from the late Antiquity was only published in 1665. Our edition of this epoch-making book passed through many illustrious hands, as it tells us itself.

In 1516 Johannes Adler published his book on the legal problems arising from the constant debasement of coins for the understanding of law in early modern times. It might be the case that he indirectly criticised the monetary policies of his sovereign by doing so.

Francis Bacon wanted to control nature by means of scientific experiments and knowledge. In 1605, the visionary compiled all kinds of knowledge and outlined new fields of research. However, he should have refrained from experimenting himself …

Agricola’s work on mining dominated the field of mining science for centuries. This was due not to the comprehensiveness of his text, but to the ingenious illustrations, for which he collaborated with several experts. They are an example of how the artistic achievements of the Renaissance revolutionized the transmission of knowledge. Realistic depictions made it possible even for illiterate people to learn from books.

Did you know that many members of the 19th century European nobility were tattoo enthusiasts? And did you know that books like Forster's contributed significantly to this? We will tell you why.

You know the trendy so-called “help-yourself” literature on the subject of “happiness” – in just five minutes, without any effort, with money-back guarantee. Fortunately, Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch does not offer superficial light fare such as this. But in 1366, he also wrote a guide to happiness.

Around 1600, war was raging throughout Europe. Happy were those who were blessed with modern fortifications. In 1624 Italian military engineer Francesco Tesini wrote a manual on fortifications and sieges because he knew perfectly what really mattered.

For a long time, Europeans thought that foreign and distant China was absolutely fascinating. Dutchman Joan Nieuhoff was one of the few who actually travelled there. His richly illustrated report about the country became a huge success.

Have you ever wondered why the noble ladies and gentlemen of the Baroque period, who are usually arrogantly staring at us from paintings in castles and museums, are wearing huge wigs? It was fashionable, of course. But why did it come into fashion? The disgusting answer is: syphilis.

Schaffhausen entrepreneur Johann Conrad Fischer travelled to England in 1814. He wanted to know how far the British competition had come during the Napoleonic Wars. His diary illustrates vividly how things were going in the centres of industrialisation.