Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (GGA)
Beginning in 1753, the privilege of publishing the GGA
was granted to the GdW. After Haller’s return to Switzerland that spring,
Michaelis was appointed the journal’s director, but in later years he expected
the GdW secretaries to help with its day-to-day operations. The GGA was thus a frequent topic in Murray’s correspondence
with its most prolific contributor. Haller worried in 1763 that a packet with
some eighty of his reviews had been lost. Their loss would mean that he would
have to read the books a second time, in order to have a sense of their content
for his own purposes, and that he would lose 40 thaler in compensation. Two
years later Murray sought to assure Haller that various of his reviews were
already in print, or were about to be. Into the 1770s Haller continued to await
copies of the GGA with impatience. In February 1767
Murray reported that the journal had too few contributors and that they did not
harmonize enough with Director Michaelis. He also regretted that he himself had
not learned from Haller the art of reviewing “so geschwind, und doch so
kernhaft.”
Some of the errors that showed up in Haller’s published reviews were attributable to his difficult handwriting. In 1765 Murray offered an unusual defense for the policy of not publishing an erratum that Haller had compiled: readers would not attribute errors to the reviewer, he held, least of all to one so far away. Nevertheless, he promised that more care would be taken in the future to minimize mistakes. If alerted to Haller’s reviews of Swedish books, he himself would proofread them. In the summer of 1770 he hoped that Haller would find fewer errors, as a result of recently introduced measures.
In June 1769 he volunteered a positive assessment of the GGA: “Unsere Anzeigen steigen in ihrem Ruhm von Tag zu Tage.”