Emil Haim was born in Jung Woschitz, Bohemia (now Mladá Vozice, Czech Republic) on 21 July 1874 as the son of Emanuel and Ernestine Haim. He started out as a bookseller in Breslau. In 1910 he opened a bookstore with his name at Penzinger Straße 60 in Vienna's 13th district with the businessman Julius Grünbaum, who left a year later. In 1913 Haim moved the bookstore to Maria-Theresien-Straße 3 in the 9th district and then in 1935 to Maria-Theresien-Straße 10 in the 1st district. The bookstore specialized in academic textbooks and manuals. Haim also supplied the Universitätsbibliothek (University Library) and other institutes in the University of Vienna. In 1914 he acquired a publishing concession (but not the right to run a bookstore) and changed the name of the company to Akademische Verlags- und Versandbuchhandlung Emil Haim & Co. As a publisher he specialized in medical and scientific works. He died on 14 May 1937 in Vienna and his wife Josefine as sole heir represented the company until the closing of the probate file at the end of 1937. Born in Lemberg in 1892, Josefine (Pepi) Gröbel married Emil Haim in 1919 but the marriage remained childless. Because of her Jewish origins, she was forced in November 1938 to sell the publishing rights to thirty-six books – mostly scientific and medical works – and to the magazines Biologia generalis, Mikrochemie and Palaeobiologica to Julius Springer Verlag for 190,000 Reichsmarks. After the deduction of an Aryanization levy of 30,000 Reichsmarks this sum was deposited in a frozen account in the Vermögensverkehrsstelle (Property Transaction Office). The bookstore, which was not under temporary administration but was to be liquidated by agreement with the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Literature Chamber), was managed from March 1939 to July 1940 pursuant to the Zweite Anordnung auf Grund der Verordnung über die Anmeldung des Vermögens von Juden (Second Order on the basis of the Regulation on the Declaration of Jewish Assets) by the owner of the Ostmarken-Verlag Gottfried Linsmayer. In July 1940 it was wound up by Treuhandgesellschaft DONAU, which had it deleted from the register of companies on 28 December 1943. Josefine Haim was forced to give the movable assets (jewellery and silver) to the Dorotheum for sale, and her property in Baden near Wien (Rauhenstein land register) was forfeited to the German Reich on the basis of the Elfte Verordnung zum Reichsbürgergesetz (Eleventh Regulation to the German Citizenship Law) of 25 November 1941. At the end of 1939, Linsmayer sold twenty-five wagon loads of books for 14,000 Reichsmarks to Antiquariat Alfred Wolf. Josefine Haim's last place of abode was the collective housing at Grünentorgasse 17/1/7 in the 9th district. She left for Hungary on 2 February 1942, wrote her will in January 1943 in Budapest where she is thought to have been murdered on 24 May 1943.

In 1952 the publishing rights sold to Springer-Verlag in 1938 were restituted to the heirs. The property in Baden was transferred in 1957 to Sammelstelle A. In 1958 the legal successors of Josefine Haim applied for restitution of the property and it was returned to them in 1960.