Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Strange Bird
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.hartford.edu/hillyer/faculty/english/troy.aspx
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Boston College, B.A. (summa cum laude), M.A.; Loyola University Chicago, Ph.D. (with distinction); also attended Harvard Extension, Faculty de Rennes, France, and Universität Hamburg, Germany.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Hartford, West Hartford, CT, professor.
AWARDS:Research Fellowship, Bibliographic Society of America, 2006-07; Outstanding Pedagogy Award, 2006-07, International Center Grant, 2008, International Research Grant, 2009-10, Vincent Coffin Grant, 2012, Hillyer College Advising Award, 2013-14 and 2014-15, and J. Holden Camp Faculty Fellowship, 2014-15, all from University of Hartford; Faculty Research Visit Grant, German Academic Exchange Service, 2011.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to scholarly publications, including Quaerendo and James Joyce Quarterly. Contributor of chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Michele K. Troy is a writer and educator. She earned both her bachelor’s degree and her master’s degree from Boston College. Troy went on to attend Loyola University Chicago, from which she obtained a Ph.D. with distinction. She also took courses at Harvard Extension, Faculty de Rennes, France, and Universität Hamburg, Germany. Troy serves as a professor of English at the University of Hartford. Over the course of her time at the school, it has awarded her with accolades, including the Outstanding Pedagogy Award, International Center Grant, International Research Grant, Vincent Coffin Grant, Hillyer College Advising Award, and J. Holden Camp Faculty Fellowship. Troy has also received awards from the Bibliographic Society of American and the German Academic Exchange Service. She has written chapters of books and articles that have appeared in academic journals. Troy and Andrew J. Kunka are the editors of the 2006 book, May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern.
In 2017, Troy released Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich. In this volume, she profiles the German book publisher, Albatross Press, which released books in English during the time the Nazis were in power. Tauchnitz, Albatross’s predecessor, was a Leipzig-based publishing house that had been in operation since the 1830s. It had been the leading publisher of books in the English language, until Albatross took over that position not long after it was established in 1932. Albatross’s founders were Max Christian Wagner, who had recently been fired from his position at Tauchnitz, Englishman John Holroyd-Reece, and Kurt Enoch, who was Jewish. The works they published by authors, including John Steinbeck and James Joyce, were so popular that the Nazis refrained from shutting Albatross down. During the war, Albatross merged with Tauchnitz and opened a Paris location. The company was acquired by William Collins and shut down in 1955.
Critics offered favorable assessments of Strange Bird. Duncan Fallowell, contributor to Spectator, commented: “Troy’s account is a painstaking act of exhumation. No coherent Albatross archive exists and she has had to recover its lost story from many disparate sources whose bewildering cross-currents remind us that transnational dubiety and multiple identity are not new phenomena. Given the historical context, she might have been tempted to slide off into overview waffle, but thankfully she sticks tenaciously to her unique dig, presenting us with a remarkable reconstruction.” A Kirkus Reviews writer described the book as “an impressively thorough piece of research” and a “wonderfully engaging history for bibliophiles.” “Troy’s riveting exploration of Albatross is a rewarding mix of publishing history, literary criticism, and biography,” asserted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich.
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of Strange Bird, p. 61.
Spectator, May 13, 2017, “The Books the Nazis Didn’t Burn,”Duncan Fallowell, review of Strange Bird, p. 34.
ONLINE
University of Hartford Website, http://www.hartford.edu/ (October 30, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Dr. Michele K. Troy
Professor of EnglishMichele Troy
Hillyer Hall 270
860.768.4734
mtroy@hartford.edu
Degrees and Certifications
Ph.D. English with distinction, Loyola University Chicago, with concentration in twentieth-century British and American fiction; minor in cultural studies on intersection of economics and culture in the literary marketplace.
M.A. English with distinction, Boston College
Courses at Harvard Extension, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Courses at Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
B.A. Philosophy, summa cum laude, Boston College. Includes semester abroad at Faculté de Rennes, Rennes, France, 1988
Teaching Responsibilities
ENB110: English Composition and Literature
ENB111: English Composition and Literature II
ENB221: English Literature: Romantics, Victorians, Moderns
ENB260: Studies in Contemporary British Literature
Research Interests
Anglo-American culture in continental Europe between the wars
Modernism and the literary marketplace (crossfeed between publishers, authors, agents)
Modernism and mass market periodicals
The paperback revolution
Publications
Book:
Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Edited Collection:
Michele K. Troy and Andrew J. Kunka, eds. May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern, London/Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2006.
Articles/Chapters:
“The Dangers of Peace: The Fight Over Books in English in Post-War Europe,” forthcoming in Quaerendo: A Journal Devoted to Manuscripts and Printed Books.
“A Modern Press for Modern Times: Behind the Scenes at the Albatross Press.” In Spiers, John. The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume II: Authors, Publishers and the Shaping of Taste. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 202-218.
“Books, Swords, and Readers: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich.” In Frost, Simon and Robert W. Jensen-Rix, Moveable Type-Mobile Nations: Interactions in Transnational Book History, Series: Angles on the English Speaking World. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010, 55-72.
“Reading D.H. Lawrence in Europe: French and German response to 1945.” Études Lawrenciennes 32 (2006): 55-84.
“Two Very Different Portraits: English and German Reception of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” James Joyce Quarterly 35 (Fall 1997): 37-58.
Honors/Awards/Fellowships
2014-2015 Hillyer College Advising Award
2014-2015 J. Holden Camp Faculty Fellowship
2013-2014 Hillyer College Advising Award (Co-Winner)
2012 Vincent Coffin Grant, University of Hartford
2011 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Faculty Research Visit Grant
2009-2010 International Research Grant, Provost’s Office, University of Hartford
2008 International Center Grant, University of Hartford
2006-2007 Outstanding Pedagogy Award, University of Hartford
2006-2007 Bibliographic Society of America Research Fellowship
Why I like teaching students at Hillyer:
I enjoy seeing them grow into themselves, leaving more capable and confident and inspired than when they arrived.
What makes the study of literature so interesting to me:
I love the combination of research and travel, where I get to dig into another language and culture at the same time that I’m chasing a piece of a historical story in the archive. It’s an interesting challenge to see who we are outside of our comfort zones. I’m also newly diving into book arts, learning how to bind books, and I love experiencing the creative process from a different side, as I experiment with collage and paint and print-making to fill them.
QUOTED: "Troy's account is a painstaking act of exhumation. No coherent Albatross archive exists and she has had to recover its lost story from many disparate sources whose bewildering cross-currents remind us that transnational dubiety and multiple identity are not new phenomena. Given the historical context, she might have been tempted to slide off into overview waffle, but thankfully she sticks tenaciously to her unique dig, presenting us with a remarkable reconstruction."
The books the Nazis didn't burn Duncan Fallowell
Spectator. 333.9846 (May 13, 2017): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Listen
Full Text:
Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich
by Michele K. Troy
Yale, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 448
For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking to discover Albatross, an unknown imprint from the English literary past. Before Albatross there was Tauchnitz, the Leipzig firm which for 100 years cornered the market in English language books outside the territories of the British Empire and the USA. One often comes across Tauchnitz and I have two of its editions: a Thomas de Quincey, with a stamp from a circulating library in Lausanne; and a Ruskin, with one from a British club in Portugal. I only keep them as curiosities, because normally I avoid Tauchnitz editions: cheap boards with awful print on awful paper. But its market was huge, not only among expats but also foreigners who wished to pursue the new world language, which, following the defeat of Napoleon, was English.
By the time Albatross came along in 1932, Tauchnitz had sold 40 million books since its inauguration in 1837. But Albatross, licensed in the same territories, was soon outselling its predecessor and indeed took over its management, though the two firms remained technically separated. Yet I've never seen an Albatross book, which is astonishing, because Albatross stole the Tauchnitz thunder not only by undercutting on price but by being very attractive visually, and the imprint sold in vast numbers.
The Albatross Modern Continental Library pioneered the paperback market --Penguin, learning much from it, started out in 1935. Albatross invented colour-coding, in the form of fully saturated covers: red for crime, blue for romance, yellow for literary novels and essays, purple for biography and history, green for travel, orange for short stories. These made irresistible window displays. The list went from fairly highbrow (Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield) to middlebrow (Sinclair Lewis, Humbert Wolfe, Richard Aldington, John Steinbeck, E.M. Forster), to their lowbrow staple, which was detective fiction with British settings. Albatross preferred living to dead authors and was nimble, even unscrupulous, from the beginning (it pinched James Joyce from Tauchnitz).
The brains behind it was one of the most delightfully raffish characters to come before us in a long time, John Holroyd-Reece, whose extreme Englishness was linked to a gift for languages, which opened cosmopolitan doors. He turned out to be a Jew from Dresden who was schooled at Repton and changed his name. The backing money came from the copper magnate Edmund Davis, also Jewish. They linked up with a distributor in Hamburg, Kurt Enoch, again Jewish. None of this would have mattered, except that in 1933 Hitler came to power, and Albatross had been registered as a German company, since its stock was printed in Leipzig. Yet its front was as a British enterprise, and its editorial heart was in Paris, then as now a more adventurous base than London for modern literature. There were also links with Mondadori in Italy.
Strange Bird recounts how Albatross survived the Nazi era, and its pages swerve through audacious acts of brinkmanship and occult allegiance. At the outbreak of the second world war, Holroyd-Reece had to fly to Paris to persuade the French that Albatross stock was allied-British not enemy-German property. He appeared in the rue Royale, 'sporting a bright red waistcoat, an ostentatiously tall fur hat and a glass walking-stick', and once again succeeded in unlikely circumstances.
The Nazis tolerated it, as Albatross-Tauchnitz, because it generated foreign currency and was a propagandist fig leaf for the regime's monomania. Albatross sales stood up well during the war. But as Michele K. Troy drily remarks, 'few among the occupied peoples of Europe were in the mood for anything German'. After the war, it was bedevilled by its German associations, its confused holding companies in different countries, and the problem of wartime royalties. It ended up in the hands of the William Collins house, who, failing to sell it on, pulled the plug in 1955. Many of those involved were exceptional operators who became key figures in postwar publishing in Europe and the USA (Enoch founded the New American Library). But Holroyd-Reece floundered, tried to establish himself in milk distribution and died a forgotten figure in 1969.
Troy's account is a painstaking act of exhumation. No coherent Albatross archive exists and she has had to recover its lost story from many disparate sources whose bewildering cross-currents remind us that transnational dubiety and multiple identity are not new phenomena. Given the historical context, she might have been tempted to slide off into overview waffle, but thankfully she sticks tenaciously to her unique dig, presenting us with a remarkable reconstruction. But something of the enigma remains. Why, in all my travels, have I never seen an Albatross book?
QUOTED: "an impressively thorough piece of research."
"wonderfully engaging history for bibliophiles."
Troy, Michele K.: STRANGE BIRD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Troy, Michele K. STRANGE BIRD Yale Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $40.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-300-21568-7
An eerie journey into a bold cosmopolitan publishing venture in defiance of the censorship rampant in Nazi
Germany.How did this English-language publishing house--established in Germany before the war and eventually
moved to Paris--survive under Nazi surveillance from the early 1930s through the late 1940s? In an impressively
thorough piece of research, Troy (English/Univ. of Hartford; co-editor: May Sinclair: Moving Towards the Modern,
2006) unearths the story of the Albatross Press, a rival to the long-running Leipzig house Tauchnitz, which had been
publishing inexpensive paperbacks in English throughout continental Europe since 1841. A disgruntled, recently fired
Tauchnitz editor, Max Christian Wegner, a wily, versatile German World War I vet, channeled his ambition into the
new enterprise with another brilliant polyglot, John Holroyd-Reece, and Hamburg Jewish publishing scion Kurt Enoch
to bring out modern Anglo-American writers (James Joyce, John Steinbeck, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and others)
in a distinctive, framed format. The press was a hit, so much so that the Nazis, recently come to power by 1933,
allowed the press to slip through "the level of scrutiny and penalty that hailed down on other German publishers" for
frankly economic reasons--the regime was frantic for foreign currency. The strange protection the press garnered
allowed it to swallow its rival Tauchnitz, until the Nazi Aryanization policy forced Enoch to flee Germany and
occupation spurred Holroyd-Reece to run Albatross from London. The Paris arm was transformed into Deutsche
Tauchnitz, specializing in "modern German novels" approved by the Nazi censors. The war also allowed AlbatrossTauchnitz's
rivals to poach other publishers, including Allen Lane's Penguin Books in London (which had hired none
other than Enoch). Largely from tracing correspondence, Troy follows the trajectory of the press and its operators,
maintaining that Albatross "became one of the last voices for Anglo-American culture in Nazi-occupied Europe."
Wonderfully engaging history for bibliophiles.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Troy, Michele K.: STRANGE BIRD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921927&it=r&asid=f1bdab5308d5825b5765754ed63027ff.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480921927
QUOTED: "Troy's riveting exploration of Albatross is a rewarding mix of publishing history, literary criticism, and biography."
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508105845868 2/2
Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third
Reich
Publishers Weekly.
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich
Michele K. Troy. Vale Univ., $40 (448p)
ISBN 978-0-300-21568-7
Albatross Press, started shortly before the rise of Nazism, had a strange and perplexing business model: it was
incorporated as a German firm, with an office in Paris and English financial backing. It was the purveyor of the great
(and often controversial) modern authors of England and America (Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence) to an
increasingly tumultuous continental Europe. In the hands of Troy, a professor of English at the University of Hartford,
the story of how this English-language book publishing company survived in the heart of the Third Reich becomes an
absorbing tale of economics, censorship, and literature. Troy has brilliantly pieced together the engrossing lives and
corporate chess game of Albatross's three principal players: the enigmatic and urbane John Holroyd-Reece, the
company's public face and mastermind of the German-English-French axis that made Albatross unique; passionate
Max Christian Wegner, who had been abruptly dismissed from Albatross's chief rival in the English-language
continental book trade, Tauchnitz; and Kurt Enoch, who ran the main office in Hamburg and whose escape from
Germany to France to the U.S. forms a gripping subplot. Troy's riveting exploration of Albatross is a rewarding mix of
publishing history, literary criticism, and biography. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593885&it=r&asid=52327f7f16d444feba5e042cb4124bb2.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A480593885