...drawing on a phrase of his author Hans Magnus Enzensberger – “paperbacks can alter our entire sociology of reading, the intellectual turnover of society” – Unseld decided to begin a new mass-market series. He remained canny enough, even so, not to present it as such, preferring the term “edition suhrkamp”, with the subversive lower-case nouns typical of Enzensberger’s poetry. Launched with Brecht’s Life of Galileo as its first volume, followed by other in-house heroes such as Hesse and Frisch, the series was a roaring success. Even difficult philosophers such as Ernst Bloch or Theodor Adorno sold about 10,000 copies in the first month alone. (To this day, edition suhrkamp has sold more than 40 million copies). Whether people were actually reading Bloch or Adorno is another matter, but they certainly wanted to be seen with them. With his flair for fashions and genius for marketing, Unseld captured – and monetized – the zeitgeist of critique.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/lives/biography/hundert-briefe-siegfried-unseld-book-review-ben-hutchinson