A Mixed Picture

From the outset, the illustrated press was fascinated by the anticipation of its retrospective exploration by future historians. Precisely because illustrated magazines aim to depict their present, they serve as «an inexhaustible storehouse for the historian», as Mason Jackson put it in his treatise The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress in 1885. The way they act as cultural mediators across time and space is closely linked to the success of the illustrated periodical press being based on economies of international media competition and cross-cultural transfer. It is precisely this argument that is put forth by the contributions of the present collection of essays.
This volume is the conclusion of the 9th annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit) on «Periodicals Formats in the Market. Economies of Space and Time, Competition and Transfer», hosted by the DFG Research Unit 2288 Journal Literature in Bochum, Germany, in 2021. As such, it not only seeks to discover the «inexhaustible storehouse for the historian» the illustrated press proves to be, but wants to contribute to the liberation of periodical research from the narrow corset of national research perspectives.