By the later part of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, more and more almanacs began being published in cities throughout the colonies. In 1639 An Almanac Calculated for New England was first published by William Pierce in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It wasn’t long after English settlers arrived in America that almanacs appeared and quickly gained popularity. Colonial America Note to the reader from Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1733. They also made long-range weather predictions similar to today’s almanacs. It was around this time they started offering advice on farming such as favorable dates for planting or harvesting crops and breeding livestock. According to the New English Dictionary, the word is probably connected with the Arabic al-manakh and the Latin manacus, a sundial.īy the late 16th century, almanacs were outselling every English-language book except for one: the Bible. The Italian form is almanacco, French almanach, and in Spanish it is almanaque. The word “almanac” first appeared in a treatise by the English philosopher Roger Bacon in 1267 where it referred to a set of tables detailing movements of heavenly bodies including the moon.
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Nostradamus published a series of almanacs in the 1550s with his own prophetic visions and wisdom.
Tablets dating back to the fourth century BCE and used by the Babylonians applied complex formulas to predict the movement and position of Jupiter. The earliest almanacs were tables that tracked the position of the sun, moon, planets, and stars.
It is no secret that ancient people tracked the movement of heavenly bodies. Long before Europeans made their way to America, almanacs existed in countries all over the world and in many languages. The invention of the printing press made almanacs accessible to more people, but they had already existed for centuries. Almanacs were considered an important tool farmers would use to plan for the coming year. For centuries farming was not a hobby for most, but a matter of life and death. It offers information such as weather forecasts, timetables for the rising and setting of the sun and moon, eclipses and meteor showers, farmers’ planting dates, tide tables, moveable holidays, and other tabular data often arranged according to the calendar. Farmer’s almanacs have a special place in Americana, but almanacs have been published all around the world for hundreds of years before Europeans began settling in North America.Īn almanac is an annual publication of current information about one or multiple subjects.
The American farmer’s almanacs that readers have come to know and love have included anecdotes, poetry, pleasantries, stories, and proverbs along with long-range weather forecasts for over two hundred years. Photo: The title page of the firstĮarly to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” This well-known piece of advice was attributed to Ben Franklin and appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanack (sic) in 1735. By Kaitlin Servant These 14 various almanacs with wear and tear throughout were recently sold at auction for $20.
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