Hoepli

Launch and first years

Born in 1847 in a small village in Canton Thurgau, at the age of 15 Johannes Ulrich Höpli (Italianised Ulrico Hoepli) became a page boy in a small bookshop in Zurich. Four years later, he moved to Triest, where he made up his mind to work in the publishing and bookselling industry. At 23, Hoepli moved to Milan and with the financial help of his brother bought a historic bookshop Laenger, located in Galleria De Cristoforis, a shopping mall built back in 1832 between Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Via Monte Napoleone in the centre of the city. Following an urban development plan, the gallery was demolished in 1931 and replaced by new buildings where the Hoepli bookshop was given a spot in the same area where it was originally located.

The first book to be published was a French grammar book by Memy Bevilacqua, released in 1871. It was followed in 1872 by Guida per arti e mestieri, a technical manual book that became the first in the series of engineer and technical manuals that will make Hoepli publishing famous on the Italian market.

Along with bookselling and publishing activity, in the 1880s and 1890s Hoepli was active as an antiquarian books collector. He acquired numerous private libraries from noble families, building up a collection of over 100,000 titles listed in 150 catalogues, thus cementing his shop’s status as a world leader in the trade of antiquarian books.

XX century

At the beginning of the XX century, Hoepli publishing house was releasing around 110 titles annually, mostly in the area of its expertise – technical and scientific publications, dictionaries, manuals and instructional books. In the field of the humanities and arts, Hoepli distinguished himself by publishing Codex Atlanticus, a reproduction of 1300 sketches and designs by Leonardo da Vinci, and a 25-tome encyclopedia of Art History by Adolfo Venturi. In 1930, he published Petrarch's Codice Virgiliano, for which he had received special praises by both the Pope and the King of Italy. Later, Heinrich Kiepert's Atlas antiquus became the first Hoepli's publication to exceed a print run of 100,000 copies.

By the time of Ulrico Hoepli's demise in 1935, his publishing house had released 7000 titles. Ulrico Hoepli didn’t have children, so he entrusted his enterprise to his nephews – Carlo Hoepli (1879-1972), son of his elder brother Johann Heinrich, and Erardo Aeschlimann, son of his sister Margarethe.

Around 1938, the bookshop moved to a new spacious and luxurious location in via Berchet. It became the largest and most beautiful in Italy. However, this period was short. In August 1943, the bookshop and its warehouse were destroyed by bombing, resulting in the loss of several million printed copies and most of the printing plates. Of the 4,000 titles listed in the catalogue, only 82 survived. The damage seemed irreparable; the shop had to move to smaller premises, and the entire editorial team was now housed in a single room.

After the war, Ulrico and Gianni Hoepli managed to restore the pre-war publishing and selling activity. In 1955, they published the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Hoepli, the final volume of which was published in 1968. Over 900 authors contributed to the work. In 1958, the new shop was opened in via Hoepli, marking a new era in its history. Spanning across 6 floors, the shop offered more than 175,000 titles and employed 50 staff.

In the 1970s, Hoepli started school publishing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the bookshop's catalog contained around 175,000 titles. The arrival at the presidency of Giovanni Hoepli, son of Ulrico Carlo, directed the catalog more and more towards technology, textbooks, school and university publishing.