They published English language literature for distribution on the European continent outside Great Britain, including initial serial publications of novels by Charles Dickens.
Carl Christoph Traugott Tauchnitz (1761–1836), born at Grossbardau near Grimma, Saxony, established a printing business in Leipzig in 1796 and a publishing house in 1798.
[2] Bernhard started the Collection of British and American Authors in 1841, a reprint series familiar to anglophone travellers on the continent of Europe.
Finally, the Berne Convention of 1886 conferred copyright upon authors in its fullest form over the greater part of the developed world.
[2] In 1860 he was ennobled with the title of Freiherr (Baron) for his services to literature, and in 1877 was made a life member of the Saxon Upper Chamber.
[1] Christian Karl received his education at the Fürstenschule in Meissen, studied law at the Universities of Berlin, Zürich and Leipzig, and was a Doctor of Jurisprudence, and had passed the state examination by the age of twenty-one.
In 1869, an English-language edition of The New Testament, exhibiting the differences between the original Alexandrine, Sinaitic and Vatican manuscripts, was the one-thousandth title.
In 1881, the two-thousandth title, Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria by Henry Morley was issued, in which facsimiles of the signatures of all the authors who had been published in the Tauchnitz series appeared.
German and French works filled a large space, as well as the Greek and Latin classics, which had been a speciality of his uncle Karl.
These included letters from Harrison Ainsworth, Wilkie Collins, Maria Susanna Cummins, Louisa M. Alcott, the Countess of Blessington, Baron Lytton, Dinah Craik, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Gladstone, Thomas Babington Macaulay, George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Lever, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Gerald Du Maurier, James Payn and Robert Louis Stevenson.