Friedrich Anton Meyer and the Early Nineteenth-century Book Culture
Friedrich Anton Meyer (1771–1831) 1800-luvun alun kirjakulttuurin toimijana
Abstract
This article explores the professional life of Friedrich Anton Meyer (1771–1831), a German-Jewish entrepreneur in the early nineteenth-century European book business. Meyer (born Levin) immigrated to Turku at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. He successfully integrated into the Finnish literary scene as a learned person who acquired books for Turku from the European markets. In addition to being an official bookseller of the Royal Academy of Turku, Meyer was a translator, language teacher and keeper of a lending library. Benefitting from the tradition of book history as well as the biographical approach, we examine Meyer’s activities in the North European literary field. In previous studies, Meyer’s German-Jewish background has remained a minor detail of his life. In this study, it offers a starting point for our examination. By utilizing diverse but fragmentary source material, this article studies the transnational contexts of the early 19th-century literary world and the practices it enabled.
Keywords: Nineteenth century, book trade, Friedrich Anton Meyer
