One of the citizens of Belgorod who made a great contribution to the city was the merchant of the 2nd guild, Alexander Alexandrovich Weinbaum.
The “Kursk Eparchial News” is known to have been published in Belgorod as early as 1871. The printing house was owned by Mines Moiseyevich Gordon and was located in Smolenskaya street in Grigorova’s house. In 1892 the printing house was taken over by the russified Hungarian Alexander Weinbaum.
The famous two-story mansion on Korochanskaya Street appeared in 1903 and was one of the city’s most beautiful buildings. Part of the building was occupied by a thriving printing house. There, business cards and wedding invitations, blank forms of all kinds, advertisements, posters, notebook covers and postcards were printed to order. Books and brochures were printed in small numbers — today they are considered bibliographic rarities. The first of these was an autobiographical novella written by Grigory Tomashevsky, rector of the Church of Holy Spirit in Kharkov.
For ten years, the advertising newspaper “Belgorodsky Listok” was published there. The building also housed an eleven-room hotel, which, among other things, had a bathroom and a telephone. The ground floor was occupied by a bookstore, a stationery shop, the only music shop in town, a toy shop and Shimon Kogan’s pharmacy.
The postcard on display shows a gathering of people in front of the building, a clear indication of its popularity among the townspeople.
Alexander Weinbaum invested a lot of energy and money in his business. In 1910 he installed a dynamo in his printing house, and a few years later he bought the latest equipment for fast printing. This reduced the cost of production considerably. The hotel had a shower and a second telephone: one was a city telephone line and the other — a zemstvo (district) one.
After the establishment of the Soviet regime, Alexander Weinbaum’s life took a tragic turn. The house and the printing shop he had built with his funds were nationalized. He and his family attempted to flee persecution in his native Kharkov. However, the publisher and his wife Augusta were found and executed. Weinbaum’s daughter Nina, fearing persecution, had long kept the paper certifying that her father had been a simple typesetter in Kharkov.
The postcards with views of Belgorod published in the printing house are of great value. Weinbaum had them printed in Stockholm.
The original postcard, published at Alexander Weinbaum printing house in the early 20th century, was lent to the museum for copying by a Belgorod collector Anatoly Tkachenko.
The “Kursk Eparchial News” is known to have been published in Belgorod as early as 1871. The printing house was owned by Mines Moiseyevich Gordon and was located in Smolenskaya street in Grigorova’s house. In 1892 the printing house was taken over by the russified Hungarian Alexander Weinbaum.
The famous two-story mansion on Korochanskaya Street appeared in 1903 and was one of the city’s most beautiful buildings. Part of the building was occupied by a thriving printing house. There, business cards and wedding invitations, blank forms of all kinds, advertisements, posters, notebook covers and postcards were printed to order. Books and brochures were printed in small numbers — today they are considered bibliographic rarities. The first of these was an autobiographical novella written by Grigory Tomashevsky, rector of the Church of Holy Spirit in Kharkov.
For ten years, the advertising newspaper “Belgorodsky Listok” was published there. The building also housed an eleven-room hotel, which, among other things, had a bathroom and a telephone. The ground floor was occupied by a bookstore, a stationery shop, the only music shop in town, a toy shop and Shimon Kogan’s pharmacy.
The postcard on display shows a gathering of people in front of the building, a clear indication of its popularity among the townspeople.
Alexander Weinbaum invested a lot of energy and money in his business. In 1910 he installed a dynamo in his printing house, and a few years later he bought the latest equipment for fast printing. This reduced the cost of production considerably. The hotel had a shower and a second telephone: one was a city telephone line and the other — a zemstvo (district) one.
After the establishment of the Soviet regime, Alexander Weinbaum’s life took a tragic turn. The house and the printing shop he had built with his funds were nationalized. He and his family attempted to flee persecution in his native Kharkov. However, the publisher and his wife Augusta were found and executed. Weinbaum’s daughter Nina, fearing persecution, had long kept the paper certifying that her father had been a simple typesetter in Kharkov.
The postcards with views of Belgorod published in the printing house are of great value. Weinbaum had them printed in Stockholm.
The original postcard, published at Alexander Weinbaum printing house in the early 20th century, was lent to the museum for copying by a Belgorod collector Anatoly Tkachenko.
