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Let's start with some history...
The
first car wich received the name PORSCHE was built in 1948 in
Gmünd,
Austria.
Richard von
Frankenberg met Erich
Strenger, the graphic artist in a movie theater in Stuttgart
in 1950. Their meeting was really coincidental, since they both visited
a Miss Cover Girl selection. At that moment Richard von Frankenberg was
writing the history of the Porsche house, and building up a press and
publicity department in Zuffenhausen. Soon after that first meeting,
von Frankenberg visited Strenger
in
his studio and after a while they produced the first Porsche brochure,
nowadays better known as the Gmünd brochure.
In 1951 they were both thinking about a magazine for all
Porsche friends. They were thinking about a name for days, and suddenly
Richard von Frankenberg thought about the patron saint of drivers,
Christophorus, and that's how the magazine's name was born. They
produced a zero-issue , which was turned out at the Heidenheimer
newspaper for cost reasons. The Porsche management of those days must
have been pleased with the zero-issue, as one year later, in july 1952
the first official Porsche Christophorus magazine was published.
In the early years, the magazine was only published in
German.The first English magazine was
published in 1956. It was the same as the German number
18, which was published in winter 1955, only the English edition only
appeared one month later. If you are intrested in numbers about the
real early magazines, just click to go to the statistics page.
So the English magazine
received number 1, where the German magazine continued numbering and
received number 18. That's why you can find magazines with the same
cover and content (except for the language ofcourse) but a different
number.
Somewhere in the seventies, the numbering offset
disappeared,
and both German and English magazines continued their lives with the
same numbers. As far as I know now, at this very moment, the magazine
is published in German, English , French, Italian and Spanish.
Usually, in the beginning , the cover pages were pictures
send to the factory by Porsche owners. If you have any information
regarding cars ,persons,activities, ... that are shown on a coverpage I
would like to hear from it, so I can mention it in my inventory.
The
subjects covered in Christophorus magazines vary from Porsche cars ,
Car races like Le Mans, Targa Floria, Carrera Panamericana and Mille
Miglia, touristic trips, letters from the readers , fashion, technique,
and many many more. Ofcourse every magazine is filled with dozens of
real beautifull pictures. Purists consider the early magazine as a rich
source to how a early Porsche should look like and how they can rebuild
their own car exactly the same way as it left the factory in
Zuffenhausen.
Click
on the magazine to go to the first 10 issues.
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