Barcelona 1:12.500

Wagner & Debes

Wagner & Debes  (Germany). The history of the cartographic publishing house Wagner & Debes is intertwined with four prominent names in German publishing: Eduard Wagner, Karl Baedeker, and his descendants Ernst Debes and Paul Oestergaard. Wagner & Debes began in 1841 as a collaboration between the lithographer Wagner and the bookseller-publisher Baedeker that lasted over one hundred years, ending in 1943. Baedeker is well known for his extensive series of travel guides for which Wagner’s fi rm produced all of the maps. Debes became a partner of Wagner in 1872. During their collaborative years the cartographic work of the Wagner fi rm (later Wagner & Debes) fell into four main categories: city maps and illustrations for the Baedeker guides, school atlases for various grade levels, a Handatlas (general reference atlas) compiled by Debes, and numerous individual maps and small atlases produced on special order, such as an atlas of church history and an atlas of locations mentioned in the Old and New Testaments (for details on atlases, see AtlasBase).

Wagner & Debes believed that foreign markets had such a bright future that they established a cartographic branch in Barcelona and arranged for the publishing house FTD (a mission order of the Marists) to distribute school atlases to Catholic schools in Spain and South America. This endeavor ended in the late 1930s, when FTD facilities at Barcelona were destroyed by Republican troops during the Spanish Civil War.

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