The Center for Business History highlights Peder Herzog as an entrepreneur and the companies he started and ran during his life.

The project is funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation and has been carried out in two stages. The first stage involved the inventory and compilation of material from various public and private archives. In the second stage, a book was produced with the writer Per T.H. Dahl as author. The book is richly illustrated with pictures and original documents from the archives.

Herzog operated as an immigrant entrepreneur during a dynamic period in the development of modern Sweden. He acted in an industry characterized by strong growth and new technological innovations that developed book and newspaper reading into a mass market. There are few previous studies that describe this development and the actors who shaped it.

Herzog collaborated with modern publishers, mechanizing the craft of bookbinding and supplying a growing market of readers with large editions of books. As a building contractor, he also actively participated in the creation of Stockholm's stone city. The company, AB Herzog och söner, became part of SLT, later Esselte, in 1918. At the time of his death in 1920, Peder Herzog was one of Stockholm's richest people; he had accumulated many honors, but was still an odd personality among the bourgeoisie's elite.

Per Dahl portrays a wayward entrepreneur at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. The book's transition from craft to industry is a central theme of the book, but it is also a fascinating social document of the time. Through Peder Herzog's life and work, we get a unique insight into a time that changed Sweden.

The book was launched at the Gothenburg Book Fair in 2016. As a tribute to the introducer of the globe binding in Sweden, it is of course published in globe.

Text: Anders Houltz

Peder Herzog: Bokbindaren som började bygga
Author Per T.H. Dahl.
Förlaget Näringslivshistoria, 2016.