Friend of the People or Weekly of necessary and useful news. Year twelve. Leszno 1845, published by Ernest Gunter, p. 208, dimensions 25 x 19 cm. Complete semiannual, bound in beautiful contemporary half leather, contains photos and numerous lithographs (including a view of Sambor in 1844, the town hall in Sambor, St. Stanislaus Church on the Rock in Cracow, Kazimierzowski Palace in Warsaw).
"Published in 1834-1849 in Leszno, "Przyjaciel Ludu" occupies a unique place among Polish illustrated magazines of the first half of the 19th century. Like other periodicals ("Magazyn Powszechny", "Domestic Museum", "Book of the World") it refers to the patterns of cheap encyclopedic magazines developed in Western Europe. However, it is distinguished by a large number of illustrations and, above all, a significant proportion of reproductions devoted to Polish subjects. The more than 1,100 Polish engravings that appeared in the magazine over the 15 years of its existence open the field to consider the origins and patterns of the "Friend of the People," the origin and subject matter of its illustrations, and finally the transformation of the universal, Enlightenment view of European culture into individual, national visions of the past and present of individual nations."
Kludkiewicz Kamila, Illustrations in the magazine "Friend of the People" - from Enlightenment encyclopedism to the visual national canon*.