(English: ''Publisher Encyclopedia'') was an East-German publishing house located in

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

. It was founded on 1 November 1956 by the

German Democratic Republic East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a country in Central Europe from Foundation of East Germany, its formation on 7 October 1949 until German reunification, its reunification with West Germany (FRG) on ...

(GDR) as a VEB. In 1964, the publishing house was merged with the larger (BI), with which it had previously cooperated already, but it retained its legal independence. was originally intended to export works from

nationalized Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization contrasts with priv ...

encyclopedic publishers, but this plan failed. The publishing house then specialized in languages, its program included

dictionaries A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically (or by Semitic root, consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical-and-stroke sorting, radical an ...

, grammar books, language textbooks and phrasebooks as well as linguistic magazines. From 1980, this included the (Journal for English and American Studies) and the (Journal for German Studies). A complete bibliographic catalog published by the publisher in 1981 listed 800 titles in 60 languages. In 1988, the number of titles published by the 235 employees together with the was 246, including 121 first editions. After the

German reunification German reunification () was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single sovereign state, which began on 9 November 1989 and culminated on 3 October 1990 with the dissolution of the East Germany, German Democratic Republic and the int ...

, the publishing houses and were converted into the on 27 June 1990. At the end of May 1991 it was sold to ''BIFAB Mannheim'', and on 1 November 1991 it was resold to

Langenscheidt Langenscheidt () is a German publishing company that specializes in language reference works. In addition to publishing language, monolingual dictionary, dictionaries, Langenscheidt also publishes bilingual dictionaries and travel phrase-books. ...

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Further reading