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Johann Friedrich Hartknoch (sometimes referred to as Johann Friedrich Hartknoch the Elder to distinguish him from his son; 28 September 1740 – 1 April 1789) was a Baltic German book publisher. He came from a poor family in Gołdap and took up work at the firm of a publisher and book trader while a student at the University of Königsberg. In 1762 he established his own business in Jelgava and soon afterwards moved to Riga.
In Riga, at the time part of the Russian Empire, he developed an important book trade and publishing business. Thanks to the comparatively tolerant regime under Catherine the Great, he could bring German books from cities like Leipzig and Berlin to the Russian Empire, and also publish and sell works by Russian writers such as Mikhail Lomonosov and Nikolay Karamzin on a European market. Arguably more important was his work as a publisher of German literature and Enlightenment philosophy. The first editions of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Johann Gottfried Herder's Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind (1784–1791) were published by Hartknoch, in addition to works by several other German-language authors.
Hartknoch died in 1789. His son would continue running the publishing business in Riga. However, the new Emperor Paul I of Russia in 1797 forbade the sale of books printed outside Russia which had not undergone censorship which forced the company to leave Russia. The publishing company was set up again in Leipzig, where it would remain in business until 1879.