Almanacs
The almanac has been called the one universal book
of modern
literature. In early America it was the most abundant and most
indispensable of all publications, a necessity to farmers,
navigators, householders, townspeople, the gentry, the professional
class, and even to scholars. The almanac had an essential place in
homes where no other form of literature entered and where, often,
not even the Bible and the newspaper were found. If the almanac
had a comprehensive subject, it was: How to get through life. The
otherwise dissociated miscellany it contained was indeed rather
like that forming the contents of a person's mind as he gets
through life each day. Not only an anthology of daily life but a
preview of its entire visible cosmic setting through the coming
cycle of months was to be found in this stitched-up pamphlet of
soft paper, "Fly blown and tattered, that above the fire / Devoted
smokes and furnishes the fates / And perigees and apogees of
moons."
Today, the almanac remains one of the most generally attractive
categories of early publications because of the pleasing
variety of matter found within it. Besides the calendar pages, it
includes farming advice, medical and domestic recipes, literary
excerpts in verse and prose, morally edifying passages and
celebrations of rural virtue, political exhortations, useful lists
of roads and schedules of courts, tables of money, and popular
humor that too often was crude, coarse, and cruel.
The story of the formation of the almanac collection at AAS
has been told in Clarance Brigham's Fifty Years of Collecting
Americana.
Some limitation has since been imposed upon its scope, and the
collection now consists of 15,000 almanacs printed from 1656
through 1876 in the United States, Canada, Mexico,and the West
Indies. About three-quarters of all the almanacs published in
America through this period are at the Society, the only such
comprehensive collection in existence. The Society continues to
acquire missing titles or issues with some regularity as almanacs
from private collections continue to become available.
Full cataloging of all of the Society's almanacs published
through 1820 is completed. They are already entered in the
Society's card catalog under title and author or calculator, as
well as by state and date, with full bibliographic descriptions.
The catalog entries for almanacs published through 1800, and for
many of those through 1830, have been computerized and are
available in the Society's online catalog. Almanacs in the
library printed from 1821 through 1849 are shown in Milton Drake's
bibliography, Almanacs of the United States, 2 vols. (New York,
1962), and those through 1876 are readily accessible by means of
simple lists and files at the Society.
A special feature of almanac cataloging at AAS is authorship
attribution. Numerous almanacs were published anonymously or
pseudonymously, but many of their calculators have been identified
through close comparison with other almanacs for the same year and
region. Identification of the authors of many of these has
considerably expanded the work of known calculators.
The great size of the almanac collection has also provided a
unique opportunity for assembling more knowledge about almanacs and
their readers. As cataloging has proceeded, two volumes of
extracts, revealing what the matter in their calendar pages and
other astronomical portions meant, what purposes it served, and how
almanacs were made and published have been compiled. Eventually
these will be arranged in permanent form to serve as a resource for
the study of Americana unique to this library. For personal
recollections, see Richard Anders, "A Cataloguer and His Almanacs,"
The Book: Newsletter of the Program in the History of the Book in
American Culture, no. 20 (March 1990).
- Richard Anders, retired cataloger
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The Crockett Almanac 1840. (Nashville, 1839).
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For current information on the cataloging status of this and
other AAS collections, choose "Collection Access" below.
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