The Schwaneberger Publishing House has been awarded the German
Publishing Award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. In 2019, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Professor Monika Grütters, presented this award for the first time ever to pay tribute to the work of independent publishers.

On Friday evening the Frankfurt Pavilion was completely under the banner of the first German Publishing Award (Deutscher Verlagspreis). Representatives of 67 independent publishing houses from all over Germany had gathered in the large party tent to receive the award. An independent jury, presided by the literary critic Denis Scheck, selected the award winners from a total of 312 submissions.

The Schwaneberger Publishing House, as well as wbg (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft), Reclam and EMF (Edition Michael Fischer), was one of the four selected larger-sized publishing houses with an annual turnover of over 3 million Euros that Professor Monika Grütters bestowed the quality label, which does not come with prize money, on.

The jury gave the following reasons for presenting this major award to MICHEL, the “travel guide through the world of stamps“: ”By awarding this quality label, we honour four publishing houses that have shown in a unique way how tradition and future viability can be combined and how the required transformation processes can be achieved. (…) With its MICHEL catalogues, the Schwaneberger Publishing House has managed to assert its significant position in the global market, to adjust to new conditions in a world whose technologies and means of communication have totally changed, and to even use these to its advantage.“

The Schwaneberger Publishing House has been promoting these transformation processes for several years in order to realize innovative products for collectors. By now new database technologies not only enable collectors all around the globe to access MICHEL information quickly and simply via MICHEL Online but also make the long-standing printed reference work more individual than ever before: MeinMICHEL allows collectors to compile any collection area, made up of the desired stamp sets, no matter how exotic the collection may be, and MICHEL information about any collection and have it bound into a “real”, haptic MICHEL book.

Another crucial criterion of the award was the social and cultural commitment of the publishing houses. In that aspect the Schwaneberger Publishing House excels particularly by promoting young people and endeavouring to raise and uphold social awareness of stamps as a traditional cultural asset. For many years, the publishing house has supported the Lichtblick Hasenbergl, a care facility for disadvantaged children and adolescents, with various initiatives and events, has provided the “Junior Collectors” (Junior-Sammler) activity to encourage children to establish and expand their own stamp collections, and has awarded the Hugo Michel Promotional Award (Hugo-Michel-Förderpreis) to specially committed philatelists.

Professor Monika Grütters congratulated all award winners selected by the jury: “The award-winning publishing houses are lighthouses in our uniquely versatile literary scenery,” she said. “This is something we who live in the land of poets and thinkers can be very proud of. It is my heartfelt desire to use the German Publishing Award to make the valuable work of publishers even more visible to the public.“

Of course Hans W. Hohenester, the managing director of MICHEL, is particularly delighted about this outstanding praise and the award he accepted in person on Friday. Having been awarded this new quality label,
we feel we have once again been encouraged in our endeavour to support collectors who enjoy this wonderful and traditional hobby with innovative products as well.