Orell Füssli Brand Guidelines: A Zurich Name From 1519 and the Kramhof Bookshop of 1993

A print shop, two merged firms and a newspaper.

The name over Orell Füssli’s bookshops is older than the shops themselves. English Wikipedia and the company’s own history page trace the business to 1519, when Christoph Froschauer, a printer who had moved to Zurich from Bavaria, set up a print shop in the city and was granted citizenship. Froschauer’s press printed works by Erasmus, Luther and Zwingli, English Wikipedia says, and over the next two centuries the firm passed between several Zurich families, changing its name each time.

The modern name came from a merger. English Wikipedia says the Zurich councillor Johann Rudolf Füssli joined the business as a partner in 1744 and became its sole owner in 1766, trading as Füssli & Cie. A second house, Orell & Cie., run by Hans Conrad von Orelli with his uncle Johann Jakob Bodmer, had taken in the Gessner family’s printing and bookselling business in 1761. In 1770 the two firms combined as Orell, Gessner, Füssli & Cie.

The merged company was a publisher, a printer and, for a time, a newspaper house. In 1780 it launched the Zürcher Zeitung, which took the name Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 1821 and was spun off as a separate company in 1868, English Wikipedia says. The same source notes that by the end of the eighteenth century the firm was also known for its bookshop in Zurich.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the weight of the business shifted towards printing. The company’s shares have been listed in Zurich since 1897, according to its history page, and in 1923 it moved its headquarters from the old town to Wiedikon, a district of Zurich. Its publishing arm took the name Orell Füssli Verlag in 1925. German Wikipedia records that the Orell Füssli bookshop moved to Pelikanstrasse in central Zurich in 1941 and stayed there until the early 1990s, but it describes bookselling in those decades as the part of the group that had fallen behind.

A bookshop company, revived in 1992.

The bookshop chain as it exists now began with a restructuring in 1992. English and German Wikipedia both say the group sold its commercial printing plant that year and set up a new retail subsidiary, Orell Füssli Buchhandlungs AG, with the Munich bookseller Heinrich Hugendubel as minority shareholder. Orell Füssli held 51 percent; the other 49 percent was held through the Zurich bookshop company Buchhandlung zum Elsässer, in which Hugendubel had a stake, German Wikipedia says.

The new company started out in 1993 in the Kramhof, a renovated building on Füsslistrasse close to the Bahnhofstrasse. English Wikipedia notes that the shop is often taken for the group’s headquarters, which in fact sit in Wiedikon. The same year, German Wikipedia says, two Restseller by Orell Füssli shops opened in the underground part of Zurich main station and at Stadelhofen station, selling remaindered titles no longer bound by fixed book prices. Online selling followed under the domain books.ch in 1996.

Growth was steady rather than fast. German Wikipedia says the company opened in Winterthur in 1997, its earliest shop outside the city of Zurich, and in 1999 moved its growing range of English-language books into a separate shop on the Bahnhofstrasse called Orell Füssli The Bookshop; from then on the original store was called Orell Füssli Kramhof to tell the two apart. Lucerne followed in 2001 through the purchase of the bookseller Raeber Bücher & Medien, and a store specialising in art, architecture, design and photography books, Orell Füssli Krauthammer, opened in Zurich’s Niederdorf. A shop at Bellevue, near the opera house, opened in 2002, and a third Restseller shop opened at Basel SBB station in 2003.

Not every acquisition took the Orell Füssli name. When the company bought the St. Gallen bookseller Rösslitor Bücher in 2004, the shop kept its own name, German Wikipedia says. In 2005 the art department at Krauthammer was scaled back and the Lausanne bookseller Payot moved into the first floor as Payot chez Orell Füssli, next to the architecture, design and photography sections that stayed on the ground floor.

Signs, formats and owners.

Europe’s bookshop chains introduce themselves first through the sign over the door. Many carry a founder’s or family surname. Bruna takes its name from Albert Willem Bruna, who took over a book, paper and music shop in Haarlem in 1868 before the business moved to Utrecht in 1890, according to Dutch Wikipedia. Decitre carries the surname of Henri Decitre, who founded the Lyon bookseller with Marius Bassereau in 1907. Orell Füssli keeps the name of a Zurich printing house far older than its bookshops. Logos and shop signs change over time, and each guide in this series describes the current sign only as the company shows it.

Store formats in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Finland are described here as each company publishes them: city-centre houses on several floors, branches in shopping centres and stations, franchise shops, and online shops and apps. Branch and country counts in these guides are given only with their source and date, because networks grow and shrink through takeovers and closures, and a chain that has closed is described as closed.

Ownership takes several forms. Some chains belong to larger groups: Finnish Wikipedia says Suomalainen Kirjakauppa was owned by Rautakirja from 1924, and Finland’s competition authority described the chain in 2016 as part of the Otava group. Others are cross-border joint ventures, such as Orell Füssli Thalia in Switzerland, which began trading on 1 October 2013. Others again are networks of independent shops under one name: Libris is a co-operation of independent booksellers run within the retail service group EK, rather than a chain whose shops one company owns.

Chains also name their own formats and services, and these guides name them only as the companies do. Corporate pages and company histories describe founders and owners, and each guide sets out what can be checked against dated, independent sources, with any gap in the record stated plainly.

Two chains, one name over the door.

In March 2013 Orell Füssli and the German bookseller Thalia announced that they would combine their Swiss bookshops in a joint venture, according to German Wikipedia. The new company, Orell Füssli Thalia AG, began trading on 1 October 2013 after the Swiss, German and Austrian competition authorities cleared the merger. Each side holds half of the shares and the board is split evenly. Orell Füssli brought in 14 branches and books.ch; Thalia brought 22 Swiss shops and the online shop buch.ch, the same source says.

Initially both brands stayed on the shopfronts. In December 2015 the French trade weekly Livres Hebdo reported that the Thalia name would disappear from Switzerland during 2016, with its shops moving to Orell Füssli colours, and, citing the Swiss daily Le Matin, put the joint venture at 35 bookshops, including shops in Bern, Fribourg and Basel. The same report said the English-language shop on Zurich’s main shopping street had closed earlier that month. German Wikipedia adds that the thalia.ch web shop was folded into orellfuessli.ch in January 2017, and that some long-standing regional names were kept: Stauffacher in Bern, Rösslitor in St. Gallen and ZAP* in Valais.

The network kept moving. In August 2019 Horizont reported 2019 openings at Europaallee in Zurich and the Seedammcenter in Pfäffikon, a reopened shop at Zurich Airport, and a new branch in the Volkiland shopping centre in Volketswil that it described as the chain’s 35th branch and its tenth in the canton of Zurich, with a corner for the tolino e-reader. In October 2026 the Bern paper Plattform J, surveying the city’s book trade, named the Orell Füssli Thalia branches, to which the Stauffacher belongs, alongside nine independent bookshops in Bern.

Orell Füssli AG’s company profile says it holds a 50 percent stake in Orell Füssli Thalia, which runs branches in German-speaking Switzerland and online shops and also supplies libraries and companies. The parent group’s other businesses are security printing, digital credentials and educational publishing. The group’s shareholder letter for the first half of 2026 says the bookshops opened three stores in that period — at St. Jakob-Park in Basel, at the Würenlos motorway service station and at the Ilfis Centre in Langnau im Emmental — and that Orell Füssli Thalia acquired A. Köhler AG, which runs 13 stationery shops in the cantons of Zurich, St. Gallen and Schwyz and keeps its own name.

For a design guide, Orell Füssli shows how a printer’s name more than five centuries old can be carried over a modern bookshop chain, and how a shared venture can put a single name over the door while keeping a few regional signs. Compare Waterstones and Foyles, two British bookshop chains with their own long-standing names over the door. For this guide we use ink, a reading-room green, cream and a spine red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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