The Gitrult Family
By most accounts the GItrult family amassed it’s considerable fortune with the written word, capitalizing on the Penny Dreadful craze that had all of England clambering for cheap, sensational entertainment. The Gitrults seem to have entered the market at its height in the late 17th century. Like most publishers, they churned out content by importing, reworking, and “borrowing” from the popular novels of Europe and the Americas and adapting them to appeal to the insatiable English market.
The Gitrults took that model one step further, and attempted to sell translations of their most successful titles to parts of Asia and Africa. Though this experiment was largely a failure, it did establish valuable contacts that would serve them well in the following decades when the Gitrults began trading in information as much as literature.
Their publishing house continued to evolve with the industry, producing half-pennies in Europe and dime novels in the Untied States, and later transitioning into novels and pamphlets with more respectable aspirations. Shortly after that transition the publishing house faded into obscurity with the onset of WWI and the Gitrults’ shifting focus to clandestine operations that would shape the 20th century.
Most of the Penny Dreadfuls were lost to history due to their morally questionable content and disposable nature. But the Gitrult catalogue was systematically destroyed, rather than simply lost, due to whisperings among the intelligentsia that they were printed with more pernicious motives than mere entertainment.
Between the World Wars when rumors of the family’s sinister nature reached their peak it was a widely held theory that their serials and ongoing stories contained coded messages and instructions to unknown and possibly unsavory organizations. They were variously, and retroactively, linked with anarchists, occultists, communists, and other more obscure groups that attracted suspicion and contempt among the public.
It wasn't until after WW2 that the Gitrults’ ongoing efforts were revealed to be instrumental in Allied victory and the blight upon their legacy was lifted. By then the remnants of their publication output had been reduced to a few books and pamphlets held by private collectors who had the foresight to capitalize on the value that infamy would bring.
The Gitrults themselves had disappeared as well. Details of their involvement in the war effort have never been fully released and are assumed lost along with most of the archives of the era. It is believed that the surviving family members have dispersed across the world, living reconstructed lives under assumed identities. While this is quite possibly the case, the Gitrults’ ongoing relationship with the Silent Library has continued uninterrupted for over a century in the form of regular contributions from one Herman Gitrult. Though we have promised discretion beyond this small disclosure, the Silent Library acknowledges the family’s steadfast contributions to the good of humanity.