Springer-Verlag

German publishing company founded in 1842 in Berlin. They initially began by publishing literature and political works, but after the 1870s began to concentrate on publishing works on the life sciences, medicine, and engineering, for which they are well known today. Today (2001) they are the third largest publisher book publisher in Germany and one of the largest scientific publishers in the world.

In June of 2004 the company merged with Kluwer Academic Press and became re-incorperated as simply Springer.

I currently work for this company as an English language copyeditor(or should that be copy editor, or copy-editor ?). We have offices in New York (in the Flatiron Building), London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and our head office is here in Heidelberg.

The company logo is a chess piece, the Knight. The reason is that the first books published by the company were chess books. 'Springer' is the German term for this piece (the springer, the jumper!).

I work with the physics and astronomy group, we are also very big in mathematics (the yellow books) and indeed in medicine.

Much of our revenue comes from journals and especially journal subscriptions. The advent of the internet will no doubt force us to adopt a new business model.

People often confuse this comapny with the company that publishs the rightwing rag 'Das Bild' (which translates as 'The Picture'). The media mogul who satrted this enterprise in the 1950's is named Axel Springer, hence the confusion. It is a populus rabble rousing rag filled with rhetoric, nothing to do with us.