Main Topics

Publishing and publications lie at the heart of the Vandenhoeck-Haller correspondence. In the first of her surviving letters Vandenhoeck touched on her quarrel and lawsuits with Elie Luzac, the publisher in Leiden whom the Hanoverian regime had persuaded to establish a branch in Göttingen around the time of Haller’s departure. She wished Haller had still been in town and able to assist her as she negotiated with the Hanoverian regime about her rights vis-à-vis this new competitor.

After his return to Switzerland, Haller continued to purchase books, dissertations, and journals from the firm in Göttingen. Vandenhoeck sent him her catalog and asked for his orders. Some of his purchases are itemized in their letters. The last packet, containing some fifteen ordered items, left Göttingen less than four months before Haller’s death. In the 1770s Haller was particularly keen to receive the Göttingische Anzeigen von Gelehrten Sachen regularly and promptly, because he relied on his reviews in this journal while working on his multivolume medical bibliography. He wrote in February 1771, after noting that two of her packets had arrived very late, that he needed his printed reviews so urgently that he was looking for a person in Göttingen who would send him the latest issues of the journal every three months without fail.

The exchange regularly deals with the publication of Haller’s works or the new editions of some of them. For the completion of his Icones anatomicae shortly after Haller’s return to his homeland, Vandenhoeck wrote about her dealings with the two etchers, who were slow to complete their work for fascicules VII and VIII. An impatient Haller made recommendations on expediting the process. Two decades later, Vandenhoeck asked Haller to provide a revised text and perhaps new plates for this work, reminding him that he had long ago spoken of wanting to do so. Haller cited his poor health and other projects in turning down the request, at least for the time being. Vandenhoeck also expressed an interest in publishing a new edition of the Primae lineae physiologiae. In declining or postponing this updating, Haller noted that the revisions he was then making in the Elementa physiologiae corporis humani would serve as the basis for a new edition of the shorter work.

Vandenhoeck was particularly proud of her editions of Haller’s Gedichte. Letters of 1759 and 1767 discuss the preparation of the ninth and tenth editions, respectively. It disappointed her in late 1774 to learn that the eleventh edition would appear in Bern. In the end she accepted Haller’s recommendation and gave the Typographische Gesellschaft permission to publish a new edition of 2,000 copies. She requested, however, a number of provisions that would at least minimize her losses – e.g., that he not make sizable changes or additions for it, since they would render her remaining copies of earlier editions worthless.

Typographical errors now and again dismayed Haller. He regretted that the tenth edition of his poems could not be printed in Bern under his eyes and urged Vandenhoeck to search for a good proofreader. His works had not always had the benefit of good proofreaders, he noted before the appearance of his Alfred, in 1773. The errors in that book turned out to be so numerous and glaring that he had an errata printed, a copy of which he sent to Vandenhoeck with the request that she print further copies and insert them in any unsold books. He expressed disappointment on learning that she had declined to do so: “Warum soll man, da man ohnedem feinde hat, mit willen seinem werke fehler lassen.”

That King George III, the dedicatee, not be given a damaged copy also concerned him.

In the early years the letters discuss the continuation of the series Sammlung neuer und merkwürdiger Reisen zu Wasser und zu Lande, which Vandenhoeck published in the years 1750–1764 and for which Haller had supplied the introduction and continued to offer his advice. The latest volumes involved German translations, by Göttingen professors, of recent travel books. Haller apparently thought Johann Philipp Murray's translation of the first part of Pehr Kalm's was poor, and Vandenhoeck wanted Abraham Gotthelf Kästner to translate the later parts. In 1771 Haller suggested that Vandenhoeck consider publishing his cousin Samuel Engel's book on the northeast passage to Asia, which the author had translated and enlarged. It was likely to be a gainful project for her, he held, “da nichts sich besser verkaufft, als reisebeschreibungen.”

The proposal failed to bear fruit.

Four years earlier Haller had sought to persuade Vandenhoeck to take on the renewed publication of the acta of Göttingen's Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, with a sizable subsidy from Hanover, but that proposition also came to naught.

Vandenhoeck’s letter of November 1759 contains a long excerpt from Haller’s letter of a year earlier (now lost). It gives a detailed financial account, spanning seven years, of what he owed Vandenhoeck and what she owed him. There he also told her that he valued hardly any undertaking so highly as the improvement of his own works. He noted that he intended to prepare a new edition of his Enumeratio methodica stirpium Helvetiae indigenarum, on which he had expended “unsägliche Arbeit,” and proposed a deal in which Vandenhoeck would provide him the plates and the Verlagsrecht.

Haller could express impatience when Vandenhoeck did not reply quickly enough to a letter of his. In November 1759 she explained that she was replying to his letter from early August so late because the armies occupying Göttingen allowed few posts or wagons to depart for Frankfurt.

Haller’s wife, who had developed a close friendship with Vandenhoeck while in Göttingen, is often mentioned in the earlier years of the exchange. In the 1770s the declining health of the two correspondents became a regular subject.