Cornelsen Access 1 Audio

[Rachelle Shriver]

Withabout 23,000 titles in print, Cornelsen Verlag GmbH & Co. OHG is one of Germany's top three publishing houses for textbooks and other educational media, including course materials, reference books, dictionaries, technical and business books, CD-ROMs, audio, educational software, and electronic learning solutions. Headquartered in Berlin, the company runs its own printing operation CS-Druck Cornelsen Strtz and distribution service Pdexpress. Cornelsen controls other publishers of educational titles, including Patmos in Dsseldorf and Oldenbourg in Munich, and holds interests in similar publishers in Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

Textbooks account for roughly half of Cornelsen's total sales. Cornelsen CVK Verlagskontor, an independent subsidiary based in Bielefeld, handles book distribution for about 50 publishers. Cornelsen also offers educational services via two main subsidiaries: Studienkreis, a nationwide private educational organization with over 1,000 outlets offering tutoring for middle school and high school students; and AKAD, Germany's largest private distance learning university offering college degrees from information technology to business administration. The Cornelsen group of companies is owned by Franz Cornelsen Stiftung, a family foundation which is controlled by Ruth Cornelsen, wife of company founder Franz Cornelsen.

Electrical engineer Franz Cornelsen gave up a wellpaying job at German electrical giant Siemens to found his own publishing company in Berlin after World War II. Living in the midst of the ruins of the once-vibrant German capital, it was difficult enough to imagine getting anything off the ground. However, Cornelsen, a widely traveled professional with a liberal education, a cosmopolitan mind-set, and a passion for English and French literature, saw a business opportunity in providing intellectually starved Germans, who were isolated from the rest of the world during the Nazi rule, with great works by English-speaking authors and with the necessary literature to help them learn the language.

Although Cornelsen had no experience whatsoever in managing a publishing company, he had an idea what it took to create a professional book. The son of a Prussian civil servant who had studied electrical engineering and economics in Hannover, put together an English-German dictionary for communications engineering while working for Siemens between 1936 and 1944. In 1938, 30-year-old Cornelsen married author and illustrator Hildegard Friedrichs, who worked for Ullstein, one of Berlin's large publishers of popular magazines and books. The Cornelsens moved into a loft apartment in the so-called Knstlerkolonie or artist's colony, a neighborhood of three blocks in Berlin-Wilmersdorf offering affordable housing for artists and journalists, where they became friends with authors and theater people who later inspired the publisher's literary program.

Two months after the end of the war, in June 1945, Franz Cornelsen acquired a 50 percent stake in Minerva Verlag, a small publisher in the British-occupied sector. In order to raise the necessary capital, he sold his Leica camera and his Bechstein grand piano for roughly 40,000 reichsmarks. Two months later Minerva was granted a license for publishing a monthly magazine for students at Berlin's public schools that replaced outdated textbooks. In October 1945 Minerva published a Russian textbook illustrated by Hildegard Cornelsen. The book was so well received by the Russian official responsible for education in the Soviet zone that he declared it mandatory teaching material. However, when the British authorities refused to grant Minerva a license to publish a daily newspaper in Berlin's British sector, Cornelsen sold his stake and founded his own publishing house, Franz Cornelsen Verlag, in April 1946.

Rental office space in Berlin was rare in spring 1946 (Germany's capital still lay in ruins) so the publishing start-up was headquartered in the Cornelsens' living room. Paper and other raw materials were hard to get as well, so Franz Cornelsen invited the paper expert and book producer Arno Levy to become his business partner. In addition, two assistants were hired who in essence moved in with the Cornelsens. The publisher's first book, published in July 1946, was The Devoted Friend and Other Tales, a collection of stories by Oscar Wilde, which sold out very quickly. Another early bestseller was Buch der Lyrik, a collection of classical and modern German poems.

Franz Cornelsen also published several social science textbooks, for example, Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley and Freedom and Organization by Bertrand Russell, which were banned from the shelves of German bookstores during the Nazi era. In summer 1946 Cornelsen set up a subsidiary in the Western German city Bielefeld, which in the postwar years evolved as a major center for the West German book trade. When the rapidly growing demand for Cornelsen's books could not be handled by four employees out of his apartment, the publisher contracted the job out to the newly founded book wholesaler Mller & Mller in late 1946.

After two years of intense work, Hildegard Cornelsen-Friedrichs and the young English language teacher Kurt Spangenberg finished Cornelsen's first product to be developed in-house, the first volume of a lavishly illustrated English textbook for public schools in postwar Germany. Published in June 1948, the first volume of Peter Pim and Billy Ball became an instant bestseller. Within only a few months, Cornelsen sold over 100,000 copies. The three-volume work filled a market niche and was well received because of Spangenberg's strong pedagogic concept, the black-and-blue layout, and its combination of text and images drawn by Hildegard Cornelsen. The three-volume work went through a number of revisions during the following decades and sold a total of 35 million copies until 1981, the year of Hildegard Cornelsen's death.

Our products stand for the highest possible quality, but our standards go even further. We want to contribute to creating the future of education and to that end we put to work our competencies in research, consulting and development. We have utilized the merger of the publishers Cornelsen and Volk und Wissen to re-structure ourselves to be able to create innovative educational solutions in the shortest possible time with the help of competent development teams.

When the Soviets blockaded all transports to and from West Berlin after the introduction of a new currency in the city's Western sectors in June 1948, Cornelsen was suddenly cut off from its major markets. During the yearlong siege by the Soviets, paper and other supplies for the book production were not available in the necessary quantities while printed books sometimes sat for months at Gatow airport until they could be flown out to West Germany by the British. Consequently, it was impossible for Cornelsen to guarantee the prompt delivery of textbooks for the 1948 school year, or any other books at Christmas time. After the siege had ended in May 1949, the market was flooded with high-quality books printed on glossy paper from West Germany, making Cornelsen's inventory of lower-quality paper and unsold copies of grayish-looking books worthless. The losses in sales induced by these developments threw Cornelsen into serious financial crisis. In December 1949 the Cornelsens moved their household and their enterprise to new quarters in Wilmersdorf and decided to limit their publishing activities to textbooks and related educational materials. It was another newly developed product that turned the tide for the publisher. Beginning in 1950, the so-called Cornelsen-Bogen were launched, a monthly supplement to the popular Westerman's teacher's journals. Each Bogen consisted of four to eight pages for students and two to four pages for teachers on complex subjects in politics, the economy or science, and included explanatory texts and photographs as well as easy-to-understand illustrations and image-based diagrams and statistics. Between 1950 and 1960, millions of copies of the Cornelsen-Bogen were sold in West Germany.

In 1953 Franz Cornelsen went on a three-month trip to the United States where he visited all major American textbook publishers on the East and West Coasts. When he returned from his trip, Cornelsen learned that Bielefeld-based publisher Velhagen & Klasing was on the verge of bankruptcy. With a tradition going back to 1835, Velhagen & Klasing had built a reputation for fine atlases and other geographic publications. Although several publishers were interested in taking over Velhagen & Klasing, none of them was willing to take over the company's debt of DEM 3 million, a very large sum at the time.

Cornelsen, who as a young man was an enthusiastic reader of Velhagen & Klasing's monthly literary magazine featuring prepublication selections from works by important German authors such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, or Alfred Dblin, was offered help in transferring the struggling publisher from Bielefeld to Berlin by a high-ranking official for Berlin's economic administration, on the condition that Cornelsen took the financial risk, which amounted to two times the two companies' combined annual sales. Encouraged by his wife, Cornelsen agreed, and almost immediately received credit worth DEM 1 million.

After Velhagen & Klasing's production and headquarters were moved to Berlin, Cornelsen's staff worked feverishly to get new editions of all of the publisher's textbooks out in time for the 1954 school year which was starting in spring. In the late summer of 1954 Cornelsen followed up with new editions of Putzgers Historischer Schulatlas, a very popular historic atlas for middle and high school students, and the English textbook Britain and America. One of the major advantages of the takeover was that Cornelsen was able to utilize Velhagen & Klasing's fulfillment center in Bielefeld, where from 1956 onward all of Cornelsen's titles were distributed. With the acquisition of Hannover-based publisher Carl Meyer in 1954, Cornelsen further expanded the company's product range to include middle and high school textbooks on physics and chemistry, readers for high school students in English, French and German, music and religious textbooks, and a number of business titles. Combined sales of Velhagen & Klasing and Carl Meyer grew by 30 percent to DEM 1.3 million in 1954. However, the financially risky takeover of Velhagen & Klasing in addition to the debt caused by the siege of Berlin resulted in years of financial struggle for Cornelsen, which, however, was finally overcome after years of determined effort.

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