Since 1883, Der Komet has been a pioneering journal, serving as a compass for fairground entrepreneurs and travelling traders. The periodical played a vital role in the professionalization of the fairground industry and chronicled over 140 years of German fairground culture. As such, it is a valuable resource for researchers interested in the cultural history of fairgrounds, media and film history, and the history of knowledge and technology. Current digitization campaigns, supported by the SciFair project and its partners, aim to make this rich historical material accessible to a wider audience.
As its symbolic title suggests, referring to the guiding star in the Biblical story of the nativity of Christ, Der Komet aims to offer direction and provide companionship for showpeople and fair traders making their living on the road. The journal’s motto, formulated in its trial issue in September 1883, emphasizes its commitment to actively defending the interests of owners of itinerant attractions and exhibitions of all kinds (Fig. 1).
Publishing news, announcements, and information about fairs, attractions and technologies, Der Komet was one of the first publications to cater to a fairground community of readers. As such, the journal played a major role in establishing a trade network of travelling showpeople, fostering a sense of community among its readers.
As a historical document, Der Komet chronicles over 140 years of fairground culture, showmanship, and media history in Germany. Therefore, it is an invaluable resource for researchers, allowing exploration from various perspectives, including organizational, legal, and technical aspects, as well as focusing on specific individuals, attractions, or media. To this day, KOMET Druck- und Verlagshaus in Pirmasens continues to publish the journal and preserves more than 5800 issues.
A pioneering journal and impetus for professionalization
Founded during the era of the German Empire, Der Komet has consistently supported and documented fairground culture through significant historical periods, including the Weimar Republic, the German Reich, and the division and reunification of Germany. Wilhelm Neumann, a publisher from Pirmasens in the region of Rhineland-Palatinate near the French border, launched a trial issue of Der Komet in September 1883, with the first official issue following in October. By the end of that year, the journal already counted almost a thousand subscriptions (Fig. 2).
Der Komet played a major role in establishing a trade network of travelling showpeople and fostered a sense of community among its readers.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, numerous market traders and showpeople originated from Pirmasens. As a result, the city was a lively winter destination for travelling tradespeople of all kinds. Neumann recognized their need to join forces and professionalize their industry. Similar itinerant showpeople periodicals emerged across Europe during this period, including Le Voyageur Forain in France (1883), which was the very first of its kind, Le Voyageur Forain Belge (1885) in Belgium, La Bussola (1889) in Italy, and the Internationale Artisten Revue (1891) in Austria-Hungry. Aside from Der Komet, other German journals within the show and trade industry appeared, such as Der Artist (1883), Der Kurier (1891) and Der Anker (1900). While many of these early periodicals were tied to specific showpeople organizations, Der Komet started out as an independent publication, though it included information from various organizations. Information from various showpeople organizations was nevertheless printed. Since the 1950s, Der Komet has served as the communication platform for two major German fairground organizations: the Deutscher Schaustellerbund e.V. (DSB) and the Bundesverband Deutscher Schausteller und Marktkaufleute e.V. (BSM).
FROM ONE GENERATION TO THE NEXT
Initially, the magazine appeared twice a month and counted six pages. From 1884, the number of pages gradually increased – sometimes including supplements – and was issued each week. To this day, Der Komet is published continuously, with short-term interruptions during the World Wars. Over the decades, the publishing house evolved under different management and expanded its commercial activities in the printing business, eventually rebranding as KOMET Druck- und Verlagshaus Klaus Endres in 1970. Four years later, the manufactory relocated to a new building in Pirmasens-Winzeln, where it is still today (Fig. 3).
In 1999, the fifth generation took charge, headed by Rita Endres-Grimm, partnering with Angelika Denig and Eva Jäger – all great-great-granddaughters of founder Neumann. At present, Armin Knerr serves as managing director of KOMET Druck- und Verlagshaus. Twelve employees are involved in the production process of Der Komet and the company’s other publishing and printing services. The journal is now published in colour as a glossy magazine (Figure 4) and is digitally available through their App and on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
With a growing international readership, the journal now features news on theme parks, circuses, and variety shows. Furthermore, every third issue contains articles in French and Dutch to address audiences in neighbouring countries.
MUCH MORE THAN A PEEK INTO THE FAIRGROUND UNIVERSE
Holding an extraordinarily amount of information on the fairground industry, Der Komet is an integral part of fairground culture in German-speaking regions. It is a precious primary source for researchers on various topics including media and film history, the history of technology, cultural history, the history of knowledge, periodical studies, and the history of professionalization, among others.
The journal’s pages document notable fairs, popular attractions, judicial changes, and issues concerning the fairground community. Next to news and information about preceding events, it provides updates from local authorities and organizers of fairs and festivals, allowing showpeople to plan their itineraries. Occasionally, address lists of showpeople and fair traders were published, helping families and colleagues to stay in touch. Furthermore, advertisements for products and services relevant to travelling showpeople are prominently featured, both visually and in terms of quantity (Fig. 5).
Advertising has always been an important source of income and vital for the magazine’s sustainability. The journal also contained a section for buying and selling second-hand equipment, allowing the dispersed community to exchange resources.
THE ACCESSIBILITY AND DIGITAL PRESERVATION OF DER KOMET
Today, single issues and series of issues of Der Komet are safeguarded in different public archives across Germany, as listed in the Zeitschriften Datenbank. They can often be consulted on microfilm, for example at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and the Mikrofilmarchiv der deutschsprachigen Presse in Dortmund. These archives, however, do not preserve complete annual editions. Particularly issues published during the earliest decade, prior to 1894, are absent. These are highly valuable because they are the most fragile and scarce to find, making them a focus for the SciFair project, which concentrates on the period before WWI. At the publisher’s premises, the entire collection of more than 140 years of Der Komet issues are bound in book volumes and preserved in a safe.
At present, the management is committed to digitize and index this unique and complete collection to safeguard the historical material and enable digital access for interested parties. The realization of this project is supported by the Kulturgut Volksfest-Archiv, Marburg University, and the SciFair project at the University of Antwerp. However, the digitization process offers both opportunities as well as challenges. A main concern in digitizing Der Komet is the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of the Fraktur font. Therefore, the project began with digitizing the issues from the 1950s onwards. Since this timeframe is beyond the scope of the SciFair project, an agreement was made with the management of KOMET Druck- und Verlagshaus to consult and digitize the earliest issues on-site in Pirmasens.
THE DIGITIZATION CAMPAIGN BY SCIFAIR
As the SciFair project builds on different types of non-digitized primary sources in archives across Europe, the team established a mobile but solid digitization set-up that meets the industry standards for digital reproduction of archival materials. An earlier blog article by Bart G. Moens and Tim Overkempe, “Preserving impressions of the fair. Digitizing the graphic collection of the Markt- und Schaustellermuseum in Essen” discusses the digitization methods and standards used in more detail.
The issues of Der Komet at KOMET Druck- und Verlagshaus are bound in book volumes measuring approximately 32,5 x 24,5 cm. The image registration is executed with a full-frame camera equipped with a high-quality lens, mounted on a tripod. To ensure consistent and even lighting on the pages, a flash kit with two softboxes is employed, making external lighting conditions irrelevant (Fig.6). A colour target was employed to correct the white balance during postprocessing, enabling an accurate representation of the pages (Fig. 7). Following image cropping, the files were saved in the sustainable Tiff v6.0 file type (lossless compression, 16bit colour information, using the Adobe RGB 1998 profile).
With this set-up we successfully digitized fifteen years of Der Komet, encompassing almost 700 issues and over 13.000 pages. All issues from 1883 until 1898 were digitized, with the exception of the year 1894, which had already been digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich and is available on Google books.
The next crucial step in making Der Komet digitally accessible is addressing the OCR and layout recognition issues. This is key to ensure that the vast amount of information in the journal becomes searchable and retrievable. The first decades of Der Komet were predominantly printed in Fraktur, often referred to as “broken script,” a font type no longer in use that is challenging for both the untrained eye, as well as for computer recognition software. Although open software like Tesseract as well as commercially developed software (e.g. ABBYY FineReader) have made strides in recognizing the Fraktur font, they often still yield lower recognition rates than for more recent fonts. The combination of multiple font types in one journal and the complex layout, which includes multiple columns of text and irregularly structured advertisement pages, further complicates the process.
To overcome these challenges, we will use Transkribus, which is an online AI-powered software tool developed for historical research by a co-operative. The platform supports work with historical documents and includes automatic text and layout recognition, as well as training models for improved recognition rates. In using this software, we aim to facilitate reading and understanding this journal, preserve the sheer quality and quantity of information that is present, and make it available for public access and research (fig. 8). In this way, Der Komet continues to serve as a guide, as it did for travelling showpeople for so many years, only now for researchers and those interested in the fairground’s history as well.
Andersen, Eva, “Unfairness at the Funfair: The French Syndicate for Travelling Showpeople in the Long Nineteenth Century”, Cultural and Social History, 21.1 (2023), pp. 65–86.
Andersen, Eva, “‘The Precious Tool and Often Also the Weapon That We Know It to Be’: Itinerant Showpeople Periodicals as Socio-Economic Platforms (1880s-1920s)”, Journal for European Periodical Studies, forthcoming.
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