Jourdan, Adolphe Dominique

Adolphe Dominique Jourdan (August 4, 1846 - August 15, 1916), not to be confused with the contemporary painter of the same name, was a prominent 19th-century French bookseller, printer, and publisher based in Algiers (Alger), Algeria. Active as a publisher from 1870, Jourdan had trained and worked under his uncle, Julien Hippolyte Bastide (1814 - 1871), who had founded a publishing house in Algeria in 1833, which Jourdan inherited upon Bastide's death. Jourdan's works primarily dealt with Algeria and the wider Arab and Muslim worlds, touching on subjects such as archaeology, translation, religious studies, and anthropology (cultures of Algeria). Jourdan also published scholarly journals, especially the long-running Revue africaine for the Société historique algérienne, and official-administrative collections such as Bulletin judiciaire de l'Algérie. In brief, Jourdan was one of the main distributors of information about Algeria and the wider Arab and Muslim worlds in French in the colonial period. Jourdan was also active in local politics and civic life. He married Marie Dermineur. After Jourdan's death, the firm passed to Jules Carbonel (perhaps his own nephew), who had worked for the firm for many years and began publishing under his own name (Imprimerie Carbonel, or, for a short time, as Ancienne maison Bastide-Jourdan) and later as Imprimeries La Typo-Litho et Jules Carbonel, seemingly after acquiring another printer. The firm continued to hold a prominent place among French publishers in Algeria well into the mid-20th century, down to the end of the colonial period, maintaining its areas of specialization (publishing, for example, the Annales de l'Institut d'Études Orientales in the mid-20th century).