“I don’t think I would accept the advice of the wise before work and the opinion of the reader after printing. But between work and printing, I can get into a state in which the help of the printer’s servant means salvation to me.” The printer’s servant, namely, the one responsible for the quick back and forth of manuscripts, corrected brush proofs and proofs or printed sheets again provided with corrections and additions between Karl Kraus and the printing company Jahoda & Siegel. The services of the printer’s clerk, which Kraus invoked with his sentence in a “Felle” magazine from 1910, were still the simpler case of this quickly timed traffic between the desk and the printing company.
Things became more complicated when the editor of the “Fackel”, who shortly afterwards became its only author for a quarter of a century, was not in Vienna. Then the postal service came into play and with it the opportunity that Kraus repeatedly seized with verve to express his outrage at their sloppiness. As long as the blame did not fall on the printers, if the text circulation that he had meticulously planned in advance of printing once again did not turn out according to his ideas.
Apart from the fact that dealings with the printing press naturally opened up another, much more delicate and in a certain sense more fertile terrain for accusations and complaints for an author “fearful of the word’s ruin”. Because Kraus’ demands for the word to be printed according to his specifications without errors could hardly be surpassed; and he did his utmost to make it almost impossible to achieve by his way of working, with ten to twenty corrections in a handwriting that was difficult to read.
“Really attuned to excess”
A number of printers and publishers with whom Kraus tried his luck when he wanted to increase the chances for his books in the German Reich failed because of these demands. Which is why, at the beginning of the 1920s, he repentantly and finally returned to the Viennese printer who had already printed a number of his books and, above all, had been printing the “Fackel” since 1901, to Jahoda & Siegel, where Georg Jahoda ran the business, a few years later The administration of the “Fackel” took over before Jahoda & Siegel finally became the address of the “Die Fackel” publishing house in the early 1920s – the last experiment with a German publisher, Kurt Wolff, had ended. Kraus had already previously included high praise for Jahoda in the “Fackel”, who “for eighteen years has honestly been attuned to the excessiveness that desires the printing of the prescribed, albeit endlessly corrected, word”. The talk of excess was no exaggeration.
Friedrich Pfäfflin, who has contributed to Karl Kraus’s afterlife through a long series of excellent editions like hardly anyone else, has now presented a volume with a selection of the surviving letters, cards, telegrams, notes, as well as some dedicated photographs that Kraus and Jahoda took over twenty-five passed on to each other over the years. It is a correspondence of its own kind, in which letters or messages outside of specific work processes, especially around the production of the “Torch” magazines, are the exception. Precisely for this reason, however, it gives an idea of how Kraus worked on these volumes, under the pressure of the publication deadlines he had set, the progressive refinement of the typed text from proofreading to proofreading, and the fear that, despite the “most rigorous comparison” and “the most insane precision “But there are still blunders when it comes to printing.
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