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Special Edition!

Written by Markus Becker

 

Frankfurt Main, late May 1631, just another street corner:

"Special Edition! Special Edition! Town from the future in Thuringia! Read everything about the year 2000: horseless carriages, lights with no flames, guns that shoot ten times without reloading. Only in the Allgemeine Zeitung. Don't miss the woodcuts of scandalously short skirts on page 3!"

Okay, I admit down-timers will probably put the woodcuts on pages one through three, but let's begin this article about down-time media where it started: in the dark middle ages when there were no media. Why? All texts had to be copied by hand and only highly skilled writers could do it, so the process was both slow and very expensive. There was no way to publish a newspaper under such primitive conditions. That required being able to mass produce texts and gather information in a reasonable period of time.

This changed in the sixteenth century. First Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1490. Now any text could be reproduced in huge numbers, little time and for little money. Printing shops were being built everywhere. Just ten years later 40,000 different books were already being printed in Germany. The first book fair was held in Frankfurt in 1564, Leipzig followed a few decades later, but in the early/mid seventeenth century the Leipzig book fairs had already become more than those in Frankfurt.

At the fairs early forms of newspapers were sold: little books with the news of the previous month. Another form of pre-newspapers was fliers. Local printers printed them and traveling merchants distributed them. They were quite inexpensive. An ordinary worker could easily afford a flier.

Also in 1490 the Taxis Family, later von Thurn and Taxis, started a courier system for the Habsburgs that developed into the Imperial Mail. In 1531 the couriers began to carry private letters and in 1597 the IM got an imperial monopoly for all mail, but it was challenged by local rulers for decades. As late as 1637 the Elector of Saxony did not permit the IM to operate in his province. Nevertheless the network of post offices got denser and of course the IM had its own "Pony Express"-like system of fast couriers.

Publishers got a never ending stream of information from freelance reporters from all over Germany, and could send their papers to the subscribers like Joe Buckley in 1634: The Galileo Affair. Everything was so quick and reliable that Johan Carolus published the first weekly newspaper in Strasbourg in 1604. He promised the readers of the Relation all the latest news from Germany, Europe and the West Indies. As well, the first Dutch weekly was published in 1618, the first French weekly in 1621, the first Scandinavian in 1644 and Spain was a bit of a latecomer(1704). Many newspapers existed for only a short time and the circulation rarely exceeded 300 copies, but they reached a large number of people and a wide range of the society. Subscribers ranged from noblemen to pub owners. Today we have sports bars that attract customers with HDTV and pay TV; in the seventeenth century pubs had a newspaper. Sending newspapers out by mail was too expensive to have more than one newspaper in the ...