Born London, January 1939, educated in the UK and in West Germany, at the Universities of Freiburg, Hamburg and Warwick.

Worked editorially in London publishing for some fifty years, from Cassells in the late 1950s, to Penguin in the 1960s, then for left-wing companies, as founder-editor of New Left Books (now Verso) and for six years at Lawrence and Wishart (Communist Party publishers), as executive editor of The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, and of its general list.

In 1986 founded the publishing house, Libris, specializing in German Classical literature in translation, and in the German-speaking exiles from Hitler in Britain. Significant Libris titles became Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics (Goethe, Johann Peter Hebel and Eduard Mörike). Libris published its last book in 2009; the company was dissolved ten years later.

Since the 1960s he has been an occasional reviewer for left-wing publications and for the TLS, Modern Language Review and Angermion, and has published articles in German Life and Letters and in Oxford German Studies.

NJ has given tutorials for the University of the Third Age on German Literature, and published translations of Hans Fallada (Penguin), Peter Huchel (Poetry Nation Review) and Heinrich von Kleist (Pushkin Press).

He initiated three London blue plaques – Italo Svevo in Charlton, and Theodor Fontane and Arthur Hugh Clough, both in Camden.

Nicholas Jacobs, married/divorced, has two children and two grandchildren.

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This biographical note was written by Nicholas Jacobs himself, for a pilot version of this website. He died in London, aged 85, on 16 February 2024.

Obituary notices have been published:
online Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Guardian
Camden New Journal
Literaturkritik.de

Also:
A letter from the German Ambassador
Nick Jacobs as editor and publisher: some memories
Nick Jacobs and William Hale White
Nicholas Jacobs: an obituary
Reading poetry with Nick Jacobs
East Berlin to Belsize Park