My father, Nick Jacobs, who has died aged 85, was a publisher who brought German writers closer to British readers at a time when there was little interest in doing so. Few have paid attention to the dissemination of German literature in the English-speaking world as much as he did.
While in Germany on national service aged 18, he began to take an interest in German literature, and on leave in East Berlin he bought a book by Bertolt Brecht, War Primer, that 40 years later he would issue in an English translation.
Nick’s first job was in the late 1950s at the Cassell publishing house in London, where he trained to be a copy editor. In the 60s he moved to Penguin as a copy editor specialising in books on history and sociology, as well as anything to do with Germany.
In 1970 he became a founder editor of New Left Books (now Verso), where he was responsible for the publication of books by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and other writers in the tradition of western Marxism, negotiating contracts with their original publishers and supervising translations.
Later he moved to Lawrence & Wishart, a publishing company set up by the Communist party of Great Britain, of which he was a member. There he became executive editor of The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, overseen by his friend the historian Eric Hobsbawm, before leaving in 1984, having resigned his party membership in 1982.
Nick’s final move was to start his own publishing company, Libris, in 1986. By the time he retired in 2009, the company had published 36 titles, mainly poetry and literature translated from German, including by Goethe, Johann Hebel and Hans Fallada but also on the German speaking emigration to Britain.
In 2015 he was awarded the Order of Merit from the German embassy in London for his services to German literature.
Nick was born in Chelsea, London, into a wealthy Jewish family. His mother, Fay Cohen, came from a family that owned Lewis’s, a chain of department stores in the north of England. His father, Michael, was Australian by birth; after serving in Italy during the second world war, he became a farmer in Hampshire, where Nick was raised.
Nick once said he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and that he “nearly choked on it”. After being sent as a boarder to Charterhouse school in Godalming, Surrey, he left aged 16 and headed to Paris on a romantic whim. He returned to England with a heart filled with European thought and a sense of freedom from having been far away from home and school. It was this new vision that fed into his later publishing career.
In retirement Nick gave tutorials for the University of the Third Age, wrote regular book reviews and made translations from German literature. Despite occasional periods of depression, he was engaging company with a beautiful sense of humour: always interested in others, always with something to draw from his wide knowledge.
He and his wife, Gill (nee Hofton), whom he married in 1974, divorced amicably in 2001 and remained friends. He is survived by their children, Robbie and me, and two grandchildren.
