Jakub Machek
From Flying Through the Air to the Rampage of the Perverse Libertine in Karlín: Folklore as a Basis for Popular Culture Emerging at the End of the 19th Century
The growing number of people living in the cities,who often grew up in the country became a source for the expanded readership of new types of popular printed media. Their Prague publishers found inspiration in the successful periodicals in other European cities, which they modified according to the expected interest of the local audience; and judging by the newspaper’s content, an interest that was much more strongly anchored in the rural mentality. More or less successful and also very specific efforts to connect the folk and the printed culture were already present in the first illustrated newspaper called llustrirtes Prager Extrablatt from the beginning of the 1880s and continued in the successful Prague Illustrated Messenger. Aspects of folk oral culture also formed the specific format of an eclectic series of titles, which we can describe as sensational and piquant weeklies from the 1910s.
design by Bedřich Vémola
