Johann Heinrich Meyer (publisher)

Heinrich Meyer came from an old family of printers who had been active in Lemgo since 1610. His great-great-grandfather Heinrich Wilhelm Meyer had moved to Braunschweig in 1707 and had taken over the printing house from Christoph Friedrich Zilliger in 1716. Heinrich was the eldest son of Johann Heinrich Meyer (1768–1827) and Dorothea Elisabeth née Pfeiffer († 1862), the daughter of a master glazier.

Attending school at the Katharineum in Braunschweig inspired Heinrich for the sciences, but the early death of his father prevented him from planning to study. Under the direction of his mother, he joined his father's book printing shop, developed high standards of typography and expanded his knowledge through specialist literature and sightseeing trips to printing houses, machine shops and libraries in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Denmark. In 1834, he founded the Journal für Buchdruckerkunst, of which he remained editor until the end of his life.^[2] On 27 October 1838, Meyer received his doctorate from the philosophical faculty of the University of Jena on the basis of his writings and achievements in the typographical field.

Because he could not agree with his mother on the management, Heinrich founded a type and stereotype foundry around 1838, and in 1841 with his brother Hermann in the same street as his father's business, the Gebrüder Meyer book printing company, which he expanded in 1843 to include an engraving company. In 1848, his mother handed over his father's business to the brothers. The title "Hofbuchdruckerei", which he had received in 1840, was revoked in 1852, presumably because of the printing of democratic writings.

After the death of his brother Hermann on 8 December 1860, Heinrich continued to run the company alone under his father's name. After a long nervous disease and suffering from lung and kidney disease starting from September 1863, he succumbed to the illnesses on November 4 of the same year.