History of the company

Orell Füssli has been in the printing business for almost 500 years. Christoph Froschauer, originally from Bavaria, was awarded citizenship of Zurich by Zurich City Council in 1519, which then commissioned him for printing jobs. This meant that the company also became the national printing house and soon gained importance beyond the borders of the then Swiss Confederation. In 1576 the land surveyor Jos Murer printed a city view of Zurich. In the following three hundred years the ownership of the company frequently switched between three Zurich families, Orell, Gessner and Füssli, whereby the activities were now increasingly concentrated on publishing and printing.

In 1827 the first securities were printed, followed by the printing of the first stamps in mainland Europe in 1843. The company began to print bank notes for the Swiss National Bank in 1911. To this day the Orell Füssli group produces highly-specialised bank notes in its Security Printing department.

Orell Füssli began manufacturing maps in 1924 when it acquired the company Kartographia Winterthur based in Winterthur. From then on important map works such as the Schweizerische Mittelschulatlas [Swiss World Atlas for Grammar Schools], and later the follow-up work, Schweizer Weltatlas [Swiss World Atlas] were produced and printed in-house.
In 1992 the entire company was drastically restructured. The commercial printing works were sold to the Zürichsee Druckereien AG in Stäfa and the Orell Füssli cartography division became largely independent through a management buyout in 1993. In 2004 Orell Füssli Kartographie AG took over responsibility for printing and publishing its map products, but the distribution remained with Photoglob. With the acquisition of the French-speaking company MPA GéoDistribution SA in 2007, the company positioned itself as the biggest publisher of map products in the fields of hiking, tourism, city plans and geo-services in Switzerland.