Nicholas Jacobs, publisher, who died recently of cancer, was a unique man who made a lasting impression on all who met him.

He was born into a wealthy Jewish family – his mother’s family owned a chain of department stores in the North of England, his father’s family were in the tobacco trade – who played a role in establishing the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood, London NW8. Nick was sent as a boarder to the renowned Charterhouse School but left it at sixteen; he is reported as having said that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and that he nearly choked on it.

From an early age, Nick developed a keen interest in literature and philosophy; upon leaving school, he entered into a publisher’s apprenticeship with Cassells, of dictionary fame. National Service followed. He was stationed in Germany and it was there that he developed his abiding passion for German literature, German political thought and the German language. He went on to study at the universities of Freiburg and Hamburg.

Nick returned to England in the early 1960s, ‘full of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Marcuse’, as he himself put it, and in 1964 he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was, reportedly, already disillusioned with the new Labour Government of that year. He worked for some time as an editor at Penguin Books, moving from there in 1969 to help set up New Left Books (now Verso); and from New Left Books he joined Lawrence and Wishart, the Communist Party’s publishing house, with whom he remained until 1984 (he had left the Communist Party two years before that, in 1982).

For some time he had been considering setting up a publishing house of his own and in 1986, with the help of an inheritance, Libris Books was born, its name borrowed from the bookshop run by the Austrian refugee Joseph Suschitzky. Between 1988 and 2009 the firm published 36 books. A good number of the Libris books were English translations of works of German literature by authors such as Goethe and Brecht – Brecht’s Kriegsfibel or War primer, for example – who were already known in the English-speaking world. Others were by contrast virtually unknown here, like Hans Fallada whose novels Der Trinker (The drinker) and Kleiner Mann – was nun? (Little man – what now?) were published by Libris in fine English translations.

Another enduring personal and publishing interest of Nick’s was directed at the life and work of German-speaking exiles in Britain. In 1988, for example, he republished Francois Lafitte’s seminal work from 1940, The internment of aliens, with a new introduction by the original author. Sebastian Haffner’s first book, Germany, Jekyll and Hyde was another Libris republication. Nick strongly supported and encouraged the work of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, publishing an oral history volume, Changing countries, put together by members of the Centre on various aspects of refugee life in Britain. With his particular interest in political exile, Nick also published Richard Dove’s biography of the revolutionary dramatist Ernst Toller (2000) as well as Dove’s collective exile biography, Journey of no return (2005), in which the author focuses on the critic Alfred Kerr, the authors Stefan Zweig and Robert Neumann, the poet Max Herrmann-Neiße, and the writer and activist Karl Otten.

Nick Jacobs will be much missed by his many friends, not least by members of the above-mentioned Research Centre. He leaves two children and two grandchildren. He also leaves a legacy of fine books bringing German literature and culture to an English readership. Fittingly, in 2015 Nick was awarded the Order of Merit from the German Embassy in London in recognition of his services to German literature.

Charmian Brinson

[ Association of Jewish Refugees Journal, vol. 24, no. 8, 2024, pp. 18–19 ]