Joseph (Osip) Nikolaevich Knebel (21 September 1854, Buchach, Galicia, Austrian Empire – 14 August 1926, Moscow, Soviet Union) was a Russian publisher and bookseller. Knebel was born into a Jewish merchant family and received an education in philology and commerce in Vienna.
In 1880, he moved to Moscow, where he initially worked in the book trade before entering publishing. Between 1894 and 1918, his publishing house produced approximately 700 books, albums, brochures, visual materials, and teaching aids. He specialized in art books, popular science works, textbooks, and children's literature. Knebel's largest projects included the multivolume History of Russian Art, the Russian Artists series, and Pictures from Russian History. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, he worked with newly established Soviet publishing and cultural institutions.
Knebel participated in Moscow's artistic and literary associations and supported various cultural initiatives in the late imperial period. His contemporaries and later scholars praised his contribution to the popularization of art and the development of art-book publishing. They described the books issued by his firm as outstanding examples of Russian book art.
Knebel is commemorated by a memorial plaque in Moscow and a museum exhibition in Buchach. Exhibitions and scholarly studies have been devoted to his publishing legacy, and several of the books issued by his firm have been republished in facsimile editions.
Biography Knebel was born into a family of Austrian Jews in Galicia. Little information is available about his family. His father, Nikolai Knebel, was a merchant who had three children and was known for his volatile temper. At the age of thirteen, following his bar mitzvah, Joseph Knebel left the family home after a conflict with his father and moved to Vienna, where, according to Leonid Yuniverg, he may have lived with distant relatives.
Knebel faced considerable hardship as a teenager in Vienna. According to the recollections of his daughter, Maria Knebel, he supported himself by selling newspapers and polishing shoes. He completed the gymnasium curriculum as an external student and enrolled in the philology faculty of the University of Vienna. During his studies, he developed an interest in books, languages, and the visual arts.
His daughter later recalled that, by the end of his life, Knebel could speak fourteen languages. After graduating from the university in 1876, he entered the Vienna Academy of Commercial Sciences, graduating in 1878. He then spent two years studying bookselling and publishing practices in several European countries.
In 1880, Knebel moved to Russia and settled in Moscow. He initially worked at the Moscow branch of the Riga-based bookselling and publishing firm I. Deubner and soon became the branch's manager. From late 1882, he and a friend and business partner operated an independent bookselling business under the name Grossman and Knebel. The firm expanded into publishing in the mid-1890s. Between 1894 and 1918, Joseph Knebel's publishing house issued approximately 700 books, albums, brochures, printed illustrations, and teaching aids.
Knebel died of a heart attack in Moscow on 14 August 1926. A notice of his death appeared the following day in the Soviet press. He was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery in Moscow. At the request of the board of the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Publishing House, and Soviet cultural figures, including Igor Grabar, Vladimir Nevsky, Konstantin Stanislavski, Otto Schmidt, and Alexey Shchusev—the People's Commissariat for Education granted his widow, Sofia Knebel, a personal pension for life.
Publishing and bookselling activities In November 1882, Knebel and his friend Pavel Grossman, a Baltic German, opened the Grossman and Knebel bookshop in Moscow. It was located in a building belonging to the . The shop specialized in literature and publications on art in Russian and foreign languages, with German-language books and periodicals accounting for a significant portion of its stock. In 1885, a subscription library for books and periodicals was established at the shop. After Grossman died of tuberculosis in 1890, Knebel became the firm's sole proprietor but retained its original name in memory of his business partner.
The firm began issuing catalogues of the bookshop’s available stock in 1883 and, from the early 1900s, also published catalogues devoted specifically to its own publications. Knebel entered the publishing business in 1894–1895, while continuing to sell books and periodicals. Among the earliest works published under his direction were writings by Henrik Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann, and Grigory Machtet.
Popular science publications, textbooks, and visual aids In 1895, a group of young Moscow scholars approached Knebel and asked him to publish their popular science works. He agreed, and from 1896 to 1900 published the popular science series Questions of Science, Art, Literature and Life, which comprised 23 installments. Its contributors included Ivan Zabelin, Mikhail Menzbier, and Kliment Timiryazev.
From the late 1890s, the publication of textbooks and visual teaching aids became one of the principal areas of Knebel's work. A "School Museum" was established at the publishing house and its warehouse. Over the course of his career, Knebel issued more than 120 visual aids. The best known was the series Pictures from Russian History (1908–1913), compiled by the educator and historian , who also wrote its explanatory texts. The series comprised 50 scenes from Russian history. Its illustrations were created by artists including Alexandre Benois, Ivan Bilibin, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Dmitry Kardovsky, Sergey Ivanov, Boris Kustodiev, Yevgeny Lanceray, Nicholas Roerich, and Valentin Serov. From 1907 to 1910, Knebel also published the educational journals Visual Instruction and Natural Science and Visual Instruction.
Fine art publications One of Knebel's principal achievements as a publisher was his production of publications on the visual arts. He recruited the artist and art historian Igor Grabar to oversee this area of his publishing program. Knebel's largest publishing project was the multivolume History of Russian Art, edited by Grabar and published between 1910 and 1916. Its contributors included Ivan Bilibin, Apollinary Vasnetsov, Nikolai Wrangel, Ivan Fomin, Alexey Shchusev, and other authors. The original publication plan was never fully completed, as production was interrupted by World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War.
Grabar also edited the illustrated monograph series Russian Artists, which included books on Valentin Serov, Mikhail Vrubel, Isaac Levitan, Andrei Ryabushkin, and Mikhail Nesterov. Although conceived as an extensive series, it was discontinued after its first five volumes because of the war and revolutionary events. The series Russian Cities—Cradles of Art was likewise not continued: its only volume, 's Rostov Veliky and Uglich, was published in 1913.
Albums containing reproductions of paintings from the collections of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Rumyantsev Museum, and the Russian Museum occupied a special place in Knebel's publishing programme. These publications were accompanied by texts by Ilya Ostroukhov, , , Alexandre Benois, and other authors. The reproductions were printed in Vienna using the photogravure process and distributed in separate installments.
Children's books Knebel's books for young children, intended to introduce them to the world of high art, became a significant phenomenon in the artistic life of pre-revolutionary Russia. The publisher believed that, even if a child quickly forgot a book's text, its colours and pictures would remain in memory for a lifetime. The illustrators of these books were, for the most part, well-known Moscow and Saint Petersburg graphic artists associated with the Mir Iskusstva movement, including Dmitry Mitrokhin, Georgy Narbut, Elena Polenova, Nikolai Ulyanov, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Aleksei Kravchenko. The publisher grouped these books into a "Gift Series", which was highly praised by contemporaries, including Benois. In order to devote substantial resources to these artistically produced editions, he also issued a large number of books in a simpler, more conventional format typical of the time. In total, Knebel published about 400 editions for younger and middle-grade children.
Guidebooks The publication of guidebooks became another important area of Knebel's activities. In collaboration with the , he published the detailed 600-page guidebook Western Europe: A Tourist's Companion (1900), modelled on the internationally renowned travel guides issued by Baedeker. Edited by , it went through six editions and contained information on 800 cities, towns, and resorts, as well as maps, plans, and tables.
Knebel subsequently published two specialized series. The first, Cosmopolitan (1902–1912), comprised six booklet-length volumes, including The Russian in England, The Russian in Italy, and The Russian in Finland. The second, Guidebooks to Western Europe (1911–1912), included separate volumes on Germany, France, and Belgium. They were compiled by Alexey Nenashev from his personal observations, information provided by acquaintances, and Russian and foreign publications.
Expansion of activities and the Leipzig exhibition In 1906, at the invitation of the management of the , Knebel, who was a major shareholder in the company, began overseeing its publishing activities. In collaboration with the Levenson printing house, he published an edition of Alexander Pushkin's The Song of the Wise Oleg, illustrated by Viktor Vasnetsov.
In 1914, Knebel's publications were exhibited at the International Exhibition of Printing and Graphic Arts in Leipzig. In the Russian section entitled "The Modern Illustrated Book", 31 of the 214 publications on display had been issued by Knebel. The section "Drawings for the Modern Book" featured original illustrations by Narbut and Mitrokhin for four of his children's books.
Anti-German pogrom and reorganization of the firm During the anti-German pogrom in Moscow on 28 May 1915, Knebel's bookshop, publishing house, and warehouse were severely damaged. According to his own calculations, the losses exceeded 500,000 rubles. He described the destruction of original paintings and illustrations, as well as manuscripts, as the most serious and irreparable loss. In 1917, the Moscow Special Committee for Assessing Losses Caused by the Disturbances of 27–29 May 1915 granted Knebel only partial compensation, amounting to approximately 40 per cent of the sum he had claimed.
Faced with a shortage of funds and seeking to restore his publishing operations to their former scale, Knebel reorganized the firm in early 1917 as the joint-stock company "I. Knebel Publishing and Printing Partnership in Moscow". He owned 80 per cent of its shares, while his close associate Vladimir Altshuler and the art historian Bernhardt Buchheim served as co-founders.
Early years of Soviet rule In 1918, Knebel was invited to the Council of People's Commissars for a meeting with Vladimir Lenin, during which he was instructed to organize the nationalization of his company. Its stock of books and visual teaching aids was transferred to the People's Commissariat for Education, while its printing and lithographic works were transferred to the printing department of the Moscow Council of National Economy.