Johan Jean Christian Sørensen was a Norwegian businessperson and book publisher.
Background
He was born in Drøbak as a son of shipmaster, merchant and lighthouse manager Abraham Georg Sørensen and Nancy Samuelson. He worked at sea from the age of thirteen, but in 1844 he moved with the family to Hustadvika when his father became manager of Kvitholmen Lighthouse.
Career
He was a brother of Niels Georg Sørensen. The family moved to Lindesnes in 1842. At the age of seventeen Sørensen became a shop clerk in Kristiansund.
Sørensen moved to Spain in 1857 to trade dried and salted cod.
His company was located in Santander, and soon expanded to include timber trade. In 1862 a branch office was opened in Bilbao, where a mechanical workshop was also established.
From 1867 to 1871 he was the consul for Denmark in Spain. In 1880 he moved back to Norway, residing at the property Fagerstrand near Høvik.
His interests in the companies in Spain and Sweden was gradually discontinued, but the companies were still ran by others
Sørensen had received education through private tutoring in Kristiansund, where he also used the library at his workplace. He became a part of the liberal movement, and became active in culture and society in the 1880s. They also published the periodical Nyt Tidsskrift, edited by Olaf Skavlan and Ernst Sars.
Sørensen was the first publisher of cheap books for the mass market in Norway.
In 1887 he established his own publishing house, Bibliothek for de tusen hjems forlag, where the goal was to mass-produce intellectual and political works for ordinary people, in a series called Bibliothek for de tusen hjem. The first book in the series was Bjørnson"s story Støv.
In addition to liberal Norwegian writers, the series would contain authors such as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Émile Zola and Alphonse Daudet. In seven years, Sørensen published 130 books in a circulation of about 600,000 copies.
Sørensen sold his publishing house in 1895.
He had struggled with asthma, and started two sanatoriums in Sør-Fron, Tofte and Lauvåsenior He died at Tofte Sanatorium in October 1918.
Views
He has thus been credited for bringing European ideas such as positivism and evolutionism to the peripheral nation Norway.