The shape and sequence of Nick Jacobs’s writings follow from his other activities. Born in 1939, he left school early, aged 16, and after this pursued a self-directed education, sometimes within an institutional framework. For his National Service in the British army, he was stationed in Germany (1957–9), and while there began to discover German culture. After this he began to learn the language seriously, with a tutor in London. Then in 1961 he went to live in Freiburg and study at the university there. Already before this, in England, he had been drawn to the Left; but now he read political works in German and English, and came under the spell of Karl Marx’s early writings. In Freiburg he joined the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund). His last period in Germany was, quite briefly, as a student at the University of Hamburg. Returning to London he got an editorial job at Penguin Books, staying there for about five years (1962/3–7). In 1964, already disillusioned with the new Labour government of that year, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain: ‘I had returned from Hamburg … full of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx and Marcuse, and with no one to talk to about them.’

The first piece of writing here followed from his time at Penguin Books. When Penguins decided to include the Communist manifesto in their Pelican Classics series, he had suggested a number of possible authorities to write an introduction: E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Eric Hobsbawm, or – ‘if you must’ – A.J.P. Taylor. Taylor was chosen. Nick took his revenge by writing this review. By then he had left the firm, going to study history at Warwick University, where Edward Thompson was then a professor.

Dropping out of university (again!), in 1968 Nick took up an invitation to help set up New Left Books, the publishing arm of New Left Review. The first NLB titles were issued in 1970. He stayed there until 1974/5. Then for two years he worked as a freelance book editor and wrote reviews. In 1977 he joined Lawrence & Wishart, the CPGB publishing firm, as an editor, staying until 1984. In 1982 he had resigned from the Party, or simply let his membership lapse.

The reviews and articles that he wrote in the 1970s follow on from his work with NLB – on Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, and other Marxist and Communist subjects. They were written for left-wing journals and magazines: Red Letters, Artery, Comment, Marxism Today, Tribune, New Statesman.

In 1986 he followed through on a long-contemplated idea of setting up his own publishing company. He did this under the name Libris, with a nod to the north London bookshop of that name (see his translation of Joseph Suschitzky’s history). Although Libris became known for its promotion of German literature, and this was a primary intention of Nick’s endeavour, its books reflected his wider interests: in the freethinking writers of the English nineteenth century, in the émigrés to Britain of the twentieth century, in Italo Svevo. During the Libris years his journalism naturally diminished. With the closure of Libris (the last book came out in 2009) his writing began to grow again. He published reviews and some translations in more academic publications. He wrote book reviews for the Camden New Journal, a local free newspaper with left-political leanings and open to discussions of culture and politics; his reviews explained some local resonance where possible.

In 2015 Nick finished writing a short memoir, done for his own pleasure, he said, and which remains unpublished. I have drawn from it in writing this note. In 2019 two books were published that illustrate the breadth and unexpectedness of Nick’s literary engagement: his translation of Kleist’s Marquise von O, and his selection of stories by the Edwardian writer W.W. Jacobs. The Germanist Nick Jacobs might have been expected to love Kleist, but not this English namesake of his – unless we think of W.W. Jacobs in connection with Johann Peter Hebel (both of them gentle ironists). Nick’s introduction to the second book is prefaced with a quotation from P.G. Wodehouse: ‘There is only one Jacobs.’

Robin Kinross
February 2024