It was founded in Belgrade on 29 April 1892 in the no longer existing building of the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts by sixteen prominent people of the cultural, scientific and political life of that time.

The traditional corporation has thus made an important contribution to the Serbian cultural life for more than a century.

[1][2][3] During the Kingdom of Serbia the Guild had[4] 11,000 members in Serbia and the Balkans and operated as a major publishing house, but its actual role was that of an educational institution that carefully fostered national culture and ideas of South-Slavic unity as well.

The Guild translated numerous Greek and Roman classics as well as French literature of the time.

Among the numerous publications of the Literary Cooperative can be found many translated works of international writers such as Jorge Amado, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Beaumarchais, Lord Byron, Luís Vaz de Camões, Albert Camus, Geoffrey Chaucer, Paul Claudel, James Fenimore Cooper, Alphonse Daudet, Charles Dickens, Charles Diehl, Maurice Druon, George Eliot, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Euripides, Richard J. Evans, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Peter Handke, Thomas Hardy, Ludwik Hirszfeld, Victor Hugo, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, Rudyard Kipling, David Lodge, Thomas Babington Macaulay, André Malraux, Christopher Marlowe, Herman Melville, Prosper Mérimée, Molière, Eugene O’Neill, Joyce Carol Oates, Edgar Allan Poe, France Prešeren, Francisco de Quevedo, Rainer Maria Rilke, Isak Samokovlija, Friedrich von Schiller, Arthur Schnitzler, Albert Schweitzer, Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Stendhal, Hippolyte Taine, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, François Villon, Virgil, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Wolfe.