Abstract

The history of the press of the early twentieth century in Chile is marked by the diversification in the offer for readers, all thanks to the emergence of magazine magazines as relevant and enduring as Zig-Zag (1905), belonging to the publishing house of the same name, whose purpose was to entertain and inform about various topics, for example: social chronicles, fashion comments, tips for housewives, adult and children's literature, among others. In view of the success of the magazine, at the same time other magazines appeared from the same publishing house, but dedicated specifically to certain audiences, such as El Peneca (1908) or Familia (1910), the first, aimed entirely at children, and the second, at women. The conquest of these audiences responded, without a doubt, to the professionalization, modernization and specialization of the press, however, this was not the only factor that had an impact, since, apparently, "new audiences" had been forming since XIX century from the introduction of sections explicitly titled as "entertaining reading" or "varieties". For this reason, in this chapter we will trace the origins of entertaining reading, taking cultural journals and almanacs published since 1870 as the nineteenth corpus, while for the 20th century we will base ourselves on the journals of the Zig-Zag publishing house previously named . The work methodology considers the intersection between Roger Chartier's (2005) work proposal on reading practices, and Reinhart Koselleck's (2014) work on conceptual history.