Media-Related Aspects of Popularization: The Geographical Serials from the Publishing Houses of Friedrich Justin Bertuch

Abstract

Geographical periodicals of circa 1800 served to gather material, and to facilitate its rapid evaluation. Travel literature enabled scientists and publishers to report on research travels and at the same time ensured a rapid promulgation of the results of the newest expeditions. Geographical knowledge has always been enriched by the support of both ethnographic illustrations and of cartographic records of remote areas. The aim of the paper is to analyze geographical and cartographical knowledge through texts, images and maps and to discover the strategies of these forms of representation; this will be based on various periodicals issued by the “Landes-Industrie-Comptoir” and the “Geographisches Institut”. In an unprecedented form of synthesis an astronomer and a publisher succeeded in issuing the Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden: this set a new standard in terms of geo-cartographic periodicals in the early nineteenth century. Between 1798 and 1831 a total of 81 volumes of the Ephemeriden were published. Contemporaneously in Weimar, another collection was issued that discussed the most recent and most significant travel accounts and news about the progress in geography: the Bibliothek der neuesten und wichtigsten Reisebeschreibungen und geographischen Nachrichten zur Erweiterung der Erdkunde (1800–1835). In this way, the world’s geographic image received in Germany from 1800 to 1830 was disseminated by the combination of texts, pictures and maps produced at Bertuch’s enterprises.