Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (V&R) is a scholarly publishing house based in Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It was founded in 1735 by Abraham Vandenhoeck (1700-1750) in connection with the establishment of the Georg-August-Universität in the same city.

After Abraham Vandenhoeck's death in 1750, his English-born widow, Anna Vandenhoeck, née Parry (d. 1787) successfully continued the business together with Carl Friedrich Günther Ruprecht (born 1730), who had entered the business as an eighteen-year-old apprentice in 1748. At the death of Anna Vandenhoeck in 1787, Ruprecht took over the business which he led until his death in 1816, when he was succeeded by his then 25-year-old son Carl August Adolf Ruprecht (1791-1861). The management of the company remained in the hands of the Ruprecht family for seven generations.

The traditional core areas of the publications of V&R are Theology and Religion, History, Ancient History, Philosophy and Philology. Current production also includes schoolbook

Textbook

A textbook or coursebook is a manual of instruction in any branch of study. Textbooks are produced according to the demands of educational institutions...

s and non-academic publications.

In 1935, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences

Göttingen Academy of Sciences

The Göttingen Academy of Sciences is the second oldest of the seven academies of sciences in Germany. It has the task of promoting research under its own auspices and in collaboration with academics in and outside Germany...

 gave Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht responsibility for its publications. These include the Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, the Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, and the Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, the last of which is the oldest academic journal in the German-language area.

During the Nazi period, V&R published the journal Junge Kirche ("Young Church"), the mouthpiece of the anti-Nazi Protestant movement Confessing Church

Confessing Church

The Confessing Church was a Protestant schismatic church in Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to nazify the German Protestant church.-Demographics:...

. The periodical was shut down by the authorities in 1941; for the rest of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, the company was forced to limit its publishing to philology, natural sciences and text books for school teaching. After the war, it went back to its earlier ambitions to be a comprehensive academic press.