The Almanac

 

OXFORD ALMANACK 1674


A table of astronomic events with predictions for the coming year. They were mass printed and can be seen as part of popular art. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century individual publishers used the term more to describe a publisher's miscellany of literary texts bound together and presented to customers at the beginning of the year.

PUNCH ALMANACKS

CRUIKSHANK COMIC ALMANACKS

MARGARET BRYAN, A Children's Almanac 1947

anonymous print attacking Patrick Murphy's weather almanacs 1838

IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

 

01. Almanac Cuts from the Boston Type and Stereotype Foundry Catalog (1832) published by Dover Books NY 1989, edited by Stephen Saxe. The cuts present modern narrative glosses upon the signs of the Zodiac.

02, 06, 07, 08 HOLLAND ; a Dutch Catholic Almanac, SUNRISE Utrecht 1940, and a most bizarre combination of image and text. Here are the covers, symbolising the passing of the year through its seasons.The covers measures 21 x 33cms.

03. Almanac in a single sheet, The Almanac for 1837 ,published by the Pellerin Company in Epinal ("L'Image d'Epinal").

04. GERMANY Insel Verlag Almanacs. Every year the German publishing firm of Insel Verlag issued an Almanac which, although conforming to the standard pattern of almanach, is more like a sort of literary miscellany with corporate references. They were very beautifully designed, these perhaps by Peter Behrens.

05. Punch Almanac for 1949, November 1st, drawing by BROCKBANK, 17 x 24 cms

09. Almanac for 1841 , a heady mixture of astronomic and astrologic lore. 11 x 18cms


10. The Oxford Almanac, one of a series of broadsides commissioned from the Oxford University Press who held the national monopoly on publishing almanacs. This engraving is by Michael Burghers who was eventually succeeded by a sequence of brilliant men, Basire, Vertue and the Rookers and James Basire who turned the imagery from the emblematic to the topographic.

AMERICAN ALMANACHS

HORSFORD1887

 

GERMAN ALMANACHS

FISCHER ALMANACH 1933

PIPER ALMANACH 1939

FISCHER ALMANACH 1931