The Luther Missouri Read: The St. Louis Edition of Luther's Works, 1880–1910

In May 1911 a speaker at the Walther centennial told twenty thousand Lutherans that St. Louis had joined “the few cities of the world from which a complete edition of Luther’s works has been published.” This essay is about that edition: twenty-five books of Luther in German, printed by the Missouri Synod’s own press between 1880 and 1910.

It began at a district pastoral conference in 1879, with Walther behind it. It cost eight thousand dollars in printing plates before the sixth volume was out, stopped selling almost at once, and was finished anyway, thirty years later, down to the index. Its second editor, A. F. Hoppe, came up the Mississippi from New Orleans in 1886, worked on it for the rest of his life on $840 a year, and dated foreword after foreword on the Festival of the Reformation.

Drawn from the edition’s own forewords, the Synod’s convention minutes, and Robert Kolb’s 1983 history of the edition in the Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly.

Read the essay, with the page images: news.collver.biz

Written and read by Albert Collver.