Every Era Creates Its Own Media, and the history of media is as old as that of mankind. After or besides the traditional “human” medium (especially the messenger, the preacher, the teacher, the storyteller), the medium of construction (the castle, park, etc.), and the medium of writing (letter, sheet, wall), the early modern age developed the print medium (book, newspaper, journal, broadsheet, poster, calendar, almanac, and so on). The eighteenth century was the epoch of the journal, and was followed by the mass and electronic media of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (the daily press, telephone, telegraph, record, film, television, and computer). The journal, the periodical literature of the eighteenth century, provided the key medium for bourgeois society; this chapter focuses on the journal as a new medium in the era of Enlightenment. The major classes of journals presented here are the moral weeklies, women’s magazines, the calendar and almanac, and review journals — all of which played an important role in restructuring the public sphere toward a bourgeois public and had a significant share in developing the literary market and a public middle-class culture.

The Literary Marketplace

In the eighteenth century the literary market consisted of, above all, authors, the book trade, journals, literary critics, and the reading public. Major changes occurred in a rapid expansion of the market as reflected in the catalogues of the Leipzig and the Frankfurt book fairs. In 1763, the number of new titles listed in these catalogues had risen since 1721 by 265; during the next forty years from 1763 to 1805 the rate of new titles grew tenfold (2,821 more books appeared in 1805 than in 1763). Around 1740 about 750 new titles entered the market annually; during the 1780s and 1790s there were about 5,000 each year. The market growth of what was then placed under the rubric Schöne Literatur (belles lettres) was especially substantial: in 1740 belles lettres comprised 6 percent of the total list and was in sixth place among the different subject groups; in 1770 it moved into second place with 16.5 percent of the market share, and in 1800 it topped the list with 21.5 percent. Between 1730 and 1740, 176 new journals were founded; 754 between 1741 and 1765, and 2,191 between 1766 and 1790.