About Holzkurier

Holzkurier

Holzkurier is a weekly timber-industry magazine published in Vienna by the Österreichischer Agrarverlag, the Austrian Agricultural Publishing House. Its first issue appeared on 8 October 1952 under Karl Graber, created to supply market information to the post-war timber trade and distributed to the subscribers of Österreichs Forst- und Holzwirtschaft. Edited from 1954 to 1994 by Kurt Gadenz and redesigned in 1987, it has reported independently every week on market trends, the sawmill and timber industries, the timber trade, the panel industry, timber construction and forestry. The publisher stated its reach in January 2023 as 16,000 print readers and 35,000 online views, alongside its holzkurier.tv video views and a LinkedIn following that passed 10,000 at the end of December 2023. Its name was originally hyphenated, Holz-Kurier, and it is frequently cited as holzkurier.com after its online platform.

First issue, 8 October 1952

The first issue of the Holz-Kurier appeared on 8 October 1952 in the Österreichischer Agrarverlag, under Karl Graber. The magazine's documented purpose was market information: it was created to serve the timber economy of post-war Austria with the market and price information it lacked. It was distributed to all subscribers of Österreichs Forst- und Holzwirtschaft, the publishing house's existing forestry and timber magazine founded in 1946, which had appeared fortnightly until then and continued as a monthly. The new weekly therefore began life with a ready-made professional readership of foresters, sawmillers and timber merchants.

Graber had been a permanent contributor in the publisher's forestry and timber section since 1950 and had recognised that the timber economy of post-war Austria had a great need for international market and price information and for news about the expiry of the wartime and post-war economic controls. The founding of Holzkurier was his answer: a fast weekly bulletin for a trade rebuilding its markets.

Contacts across the Iron Curtain

The magazine's history records a striking detail of its early years: Graber succeeded in maintaining and rebuilding journalistic contacts with Austria's neighbouring countries, above all with the states then behind the Iron Curtain. For a timber trade whose natural markets and supply regions lay in Central and Eastern Europe, those contacts were commercially vital, and a Vienna trade weekly that could report from and about those markets had a function no domestic-only publication could fulfil. Austria's neutrality and Vienna's position between the blocs gave Holzkurier a listening post role in the European timber trade.

Under Kurt Gadenz, who edited the magazine from 1954, contacts with Italy were intensified — the history names the timber merchant Roberto Tengg as an Italian connection — as the trade pressed for the rapid dismantling of foreign-trade restrictions, while the paper and furniture industries feared for their raw material if tariff barriers rose. Holzkurier's pages were where those competing interests followed the same market.

The Gadenz era, 1954 to 1994

Kurt Gadenz edited Holzkurier from 1954 to 1994, a forty-year tenure that spans Austria's post-war reconstruction, its export boom and its preparation for European Union membership. Under his leadership the magazine was redesigned in 1987. Long editorships are characteristic of trade journalism, where the editor's network of merchants, sawmillers, forest owners and officials is the publication's real capital, and Gadenz's four decades gave Holzkurier continuity across the entire transformation of the Austrian timber industry from a rationed post-war trade to a modern export industry.

The magazine's memory of that era, preserved in its historical features — its retrospective series quotes its own reporting from the 1950s on Carinthian sawmills, export controls and turnover-tax rebates in the timber export trade — shows a weekly that functioned as the trade's diary. Historians of the Austrian timber industry use such trade press as a primary source precisely because titles like Holzkurier recorded prices, policies and quarrels week by week.

A weekly for the whole timber chain

Holzkurier's documented beat covers the entire wood value chain. Trade descriptions summarise it as informing readers weekly and independently about market trends, the sawmill and timber industries, the timber trade, the panel industry, timber construction, forestry, and the floor and window producers. The magazine's own analysis describes its coverage of the trends reshaping the industry: the growing importance of wood as a sustainable building material, digitalisation in the timber industry, the development of new wood-based materials, and the trend toward prefabrication in serial timber construction and renovation.

Its editorial team also publishes freely accessible thematic overviews on its blog — rankings and surveys such as the largest pellet producers, the largest sawmills and the most significant timber buildings in the world — and its own industry surveys, such as the regular Holzkurier survey of German softwood sawmills' cutting volumes and of forest enterprises' satisfaction with their half-year results, are cited as industry data in their own right. A trade weekly that both reports the market and measures it occupies a particular position of trust.

Print, online and holzkurier.tv

The publisher's figures, given in January 2023, put Holzkurier's weekly gross reach at 16,000 readers in print, 35,000 online views, 25,000 holzkurier.tv views, and 7,600 followers with 100,000 impressions a month on LinkedIn; on 30 December 2023 the magazine passed 10,000 LinkedIn followers. Those are the publisher's own stated figures for that date, quoted here with their date attached, not audited circulation, and they show the shape of a modern trade title: the printed weekly remains the core, but video, web news and professional social media now deliver a large share of its reach.

Trade publisher Agrarverlag places Holzkurier within a forestry and timber portfolio that also includes Forstzeitung, Holzbau Austria and the Timber Online portal in German and English. Within that family, Holzkurier is the fast commercial title — markets, prices, companies — while Forstzeitung addresses forestry practice and policy on a monthly rhythm.

The publisher: Österreichischer Agrarverlag

Holzkurier's publisher, the Österreichischer Agrarverlag in Vienna, was founded in 1928 and is one of Austria's oldest magazine and book publishing houses, issuing dozens of specialist and consumer titles across agriculture, forestry, timber, gardens, food and rural life. Since December 2023 the publishing house has been owned by the Raiffeisen-Holding Niederösterreich-Wien. For Holzkurier, belonging to a large agricultural publisher brings the weekly inside a stable house whose other titles serve the same rural and primary industries, sharing printing, distribution and advertising infrastructure.

Vienna as the place of publication puts the magazine at the seat of the federal ministries, the timber trade associations and the Agrarverlag's own offices, while its readership is spread across the Alpine forest regions where Austria's sawmills and forests actually are.

Why market information matters in timber

Timber is a commodity with volatile prices, regional supply, weather-driven harvests and export markets that open and close with exchange rates, building cycles and trade politics. A weekly cadence — Holzkurier's defining rhythm since 1952 — matches that volatility: prices, demand and policy change faster than a monthly can follow. The founding insight of 1952, that the trade needed international market and price information above all, remains the magazine's working principle, now executed through daily online coverage and data surveys as well as the printed week.

The magazine's coverage of calamity timber — storm, snow and bark-beetle damage, which its forest-enterprise surveys track season by season — shows the other side of that information service: not prices alone, but the physical condition of the forests and the industry that depends on them, reported as operational intelligence for practitioners.

Holzkurier and Forstzeitung

Readers should distinguish Holzkurier from its stablemate Forstzeitung, with which it is sometimes confused. Forstzeitung, founded in 1883, is the Agrarverlag's monthly magazine for forestry — forest management, technology, torrent and avalanche control and hunting — while Holzkurier, founded in 1952, is the weekly commercial magazine of the timber industry: markets, sawmills, trade and construction. The two titles were born of the same publishing house seventy years apart and still serve the two halves, forest and market, of one industry. Holzkurier's own birth certificate shows the relationship: it was first distributed to the subscribers of the house's forestry and timber magazine because its readers worked in both worlds.

Together with Holzbau Austria, for timber construction, the Agrarverlag titles cover the chain from the standing tree to the finished building, and Holzkurier is the commercial hinge in the middle of that chain.

Sources and the limits of the record

The verifiable core of Holzkurier's history is compact: first issue 8 October 1952, Karl Graber, distribution to the subscribers of Österreichs Forst- und Holzwirtschaft, the Gadenz editorship 1954–1994, the 1987 redesign, weekly publication by the Österreichischer Agrarverlag in Vienna, and the publisher's January 2023 reach figures. Beyond that core, this profile relies on the magazine's own retrospective features for the colour of its early decades — the Iron Curtain contacts, the Italian trade connections, the post-war hunger for price information — which are the publisher's documented account of its own history. Current editorial staff beyond the historical editors named here are not listed, because they change and are best taken from the magazine's own imprint.

No ÖAK audited circulation is quoted, because none is given in the sources used; the reach figures are the publisher's, dated January 2023, and should be cited as such.

Current status

Holzkurier remains in weekly publication from Vienna as the Österreichischer Agrarverlag's timber-industry magazine, with its online platform at holzkurier.com, its holzkurier.tv video output and its industry surveys and rankings published as reference material for the trade. More than seventy years after Karl Graber's first issue of 8 October 1952, it is still doing the job it was founded to do: telling Austria's forest and timber economy, every week, what the market is doing — now across print, web, video and professional networks Graber could not have imagined, but for the same practical reasons he identified in the controlled, information-starved market of 1952.