In 1873/1874, modern new premises for the Bibliographisches Institut were built in Leipzig – a publishing house founded almost 50 years prior in Gotha by Joseph Meyer, which had in the intervening years published several reference classics such as Meyers Konversationslexikon. In 1890 the growing Leipzig operation was again expanded to include a print shop and bookbindery. The four-part building covered a total of 6,600 square metres at its location in the east of the city.   Around the turn of the century, over 600 employees worked in the four-storey building.

Due to the quantity of produced books, the speed of the printing presses and extensive automation, the capabilities of the Institut in Leipzig were highly impressive to contemporaries. By concentrating the various departments and work steps required to produce printed materials, the facility came to epitomise the pinnacle of industrialised mass production. The Institut employed relief, intaglio and planographic printing methods. Editorial, organisational and technical processes were conducted in parallel under the same roof. During World War II, the publishing building was almost entirely destroyed by bombing.