Tyler van Opstal- Some brief notes on the Philosophical Library

    Philosophical Library is a specialty publisher who purports to publish “Books of Lasting Value.” Founded in 1941 by Dagobert D. Runes, a philosopher who had immigrated to America from Austria, unlike many other publishers that seek to publish great works Runes was instead chiefly interested in publishing new or recent work from European intellectuals and scholars, especially those who had fled Europe due to racial and religious persecution in the 1930s, a circle of writers that Rune was well familiar with by virtue of belonging to it himself.  

    His own immigration to America was caused by the persecution of the Christian Social Party, a conservative Catholic party in charge of Austria when Runes wrote his first book The True Jesus or the Fifth Gospel (1927) with the financial aid of the opposition political party (the Social Democratic Party), a book that caused the imprisonment of his publisher and his own flight from the country in 1928. He might have considered himself lucky that he left when he did, as several years later in 1934 the CSP produced a new constitution declaring Austria to be a one-party state and militarily suppressing the other parties including Runes’ former benefactor. (As a side note, while the CSP and their Federal State of Austria was an authoritarian, highly-prejudiced, and oppressive regime, they did at least one thing right in outlawing the Austrian Nazi party and violently cracking down on it, though this led to its leader being assassinated by the Nazis just two months after declaring the one-party state.) 

    The most famous of the ex-European scholars published by Runes was undoubtedly Albert Einstein, who became a resident of America in 1933 after the rise of Hitler in Germany, but altogether Runes and his Philosophical Library published work by twenty-two Nobel Prize winners including masterpieces such as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The Philosophical Library is thus well represented on the shelves of universities and their professors, with our own Dr. Redick having two titles of theirs on his office’s modern philosophy shelf, Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotion and Wahl’s Short History of Existentialism (Wahl spent several years in America after escaping a Nazi internment camp).      

    The Philosophical Library (so far as I can tell from lack of official announcement of their demise) remains in operation today, though after the death of Runes in the 1980s it began placing a smaller emphasis on publishing new work and mostly working on keeping their Books of Lasting Value in print. Today, their website is a mess of broken links- store links to buy books lead to page errors, their ‘titles’ section is entirely missing, and their Facebook link leads to the Facebook homepage rather than the publisher’s account, which has not posted anything since 2018. Their Twitter link similarly leads to the Twitter homepage, and their account on the platform has also not posted anything since 2018 except for a suspicious looking 2020 post of an AOL link that claims to show “ways to reduce your taxes” that makes me wonder if the account was taken over by hackers at some point and never reclaimed. The most recent work published by them I can find online are a wave of 2015 editions of older works, including Maritain’s Art and Poetry (1935) and several by Runes himself. 

    If the Philosophical Library did indeed go defunct somewhere around 2018, they can rest confidently that their books have largely been of lasting value. Many of the works published by them have since been published by other larger publishers, and their contribution to the academic scene is already respectable regardless of what fate currently befalls them. 

 

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