The penny magazine
The Pfennig magazine, published in cooperation with the Society for the Dissemination of Non-Profit Knowledge, was the first weekly German magazine that relied on the combination of text and images for the communication of popular science, especially medical and natural history. This was made possible by the development of wood engraving , which was less expensive to produce and better suited for large editions than the copper engraving , which was previously used to reproduce images .
The Pfennig magazine appeared weekly from May 4, 1833 to 1855 with a circulation of up to 100,000 copies, e.g. B. in the year 1847. The booklets each comprised eight pages in quarto format , which were illustrated with up to six wood engravings. In No. 1 of the Pfennig magazine it says: "The dissemination of useful knowledge is the most beautiful gift one can give to one's century."
The editorial management was until 1834 the bookseller and later publisher Johann Jakob Weber , who from 1843 published the first large-format, weekly picture magazine in Germany with the Illustrierte Zeitung .
Background and development
The penny magazines are regarded as the forerunners of the illustrated magazines. Typical for these magazines was the communication of popular scientific topics through the combination of text and images. The first of its kind was Penny Magazine, published in England in 1832, which aimed to disseminate useful knowledge at a price affordable to the middle class and the working class. The great success of this concept, with a print run of 200,000 copies by the end of 1832, meant that publications comparable to Le Magasin pittoresque were also published in other countries such as France . Martin Bossange , the Parisian publisher of Magasin pittoresque, arranged for a German edition to be published through his branch bookstore in Leipzig. The Pfennig magazine appeared for the first time in May 1833 under the editorial direction of Johann Jakob Weber. When the publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus took over the magazine after a short time , Weber set up his own publishing house.
In the German-speaking area, the Pfennig magazine replaced the tradition of health catechisms founded by Martin Pansa in Breslau and Leipzig.
“In the 1830s, the press system in the German Confederation was restricted by press law. All writings up to 20 printed sheets were subject to censorship and stamp duty, the aim of which was to limit the discussion of political matters to the smallest possible extent. [...] The limitation of the German Pfennig magazines to briefly conveying ethnological, archaeological, art-historical, humanities, technology and natural science topics was consequently not part of a people's educational concept, but the tax levy forced the content to be reduced to non-current and non-political contributions from the papers. "
With the emergence of illustrated magazines in the 1840s, the Pfennig magazine had to adapt to changing reader needs and appeared in the January 1843 issue with the subtitle “for instruction and entertainment”: “We believe the purpose of our magazine to disseminate non-profit knowledge to that effect to have to expand so that this no longer takes place, as before, merely in the form of instruction, but as far as possible, also in the form of entertainment. "
The competing magazine Die Gartenlaube , founded in 1853, finally replaced the Pfennig magazine in 1855.
literature
- Gundolf Keil : Review of: Florian Mildenberger: Medical instruction for the bourgeoisie. Medicinal cultures in the magazine "Die Gartenlaube" (1853–1944). Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2012 (= medicine, society and history. Supplement 45), ISBN 978-3-515-10232-2 . In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 34, 2015 (2016), pp. 306-313, here: pp. 308 f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bernd Weise: Current news pictures "After Photographien", in: Charles Grivel u. a. (Ed.): The conquest of images. Photography in Buch und Presse 1816–1914, Munich 2003, p. 66
- ↑ ibid. P. 63
- ^ Gundolf Keil: The health catechisms of the Breslau city doctor Martin Pansa (1580–1626). In: Klaus Garber: Cultural history of Silesia in the early modern times. 2 volumes, Tübingen 2005, volume 1, pp. 287-319.
- ↑ ibid. P. 65
- ↑ ibid. P. 64.
