Almanacs represent one of the oldest and most popular subjects around which to build a private library.
As John Carter defines them in ABC for Book Collectors, almanacs are
[c]alendar[s], usually in pocket-book (more rarely sheet) form, augmented with Saints’ days, fair-dates and astronomical and meteorological data; a bestseller from the start and protected by jealously guarded patents, the different titles [were especially] hot rivals in the 17th century....
The earliest known version of what we today recognize as an almanac was the 11th century CE Almanac of Azarqueil (1088), written by the famed Arab astronomer and mathematician Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm ibn Yaḥyā al-Naqqāsh al-Zarqālī (usually Latinized as Arzachel--the lunar crater of this name was named after him). A Latin translation of his work, known as the Tables of Toledo, was published by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century. Arzachel's almanac has been reprinted several times (the most recent English-language reprint was published in 2003).
Manuscript almanacs published in the 12th and 13th centuries are found in a number of major libraries, such as the British Library. The first printed almanac in Western Europe was published ca. 1457, and almanacs were popular titles during the incunabula period of printing in Western Europe (the image below is of the only known surviving copy of the Almanach cracoviense ad annum 1474, a single-sheet almanac that is Poland's earliest surviving document):
The first printed English-language almanac was Richard Pynson's 1497 publication of the Sheapheard’s Kalendar (translated from an earlier French original). As Carter noted, by the 17th century a profusion of almanacs were being produced, and in England they were second in popularity only to the Bible:
By the middle of the 17th century some 400,000 almanacs were being printed every year in England alone.
Almanacs were first printed in the United States in 1639 when William Pierce published (and Stephen Daye printed) An Almanack For The Year Of Our Lord 1639 Calculated For New England on Harvard University's one-year old press. But the best known early American almanac, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, did not begin publication until almost 100 years later (1732):
Several of today's best-known almanacs are products of the 18th-19th centuries. Among these are the Old Farmer's Almanac (the oldest continuously published periodical in America, founded in 1792), and Whitaker's Almanack, first published in Great Britain in 1868.
Early almanacs often received very rigorous use. Copies in Fine condition are rarely available in the marketplace, and when they do come on the market they generally are quite expensive:
Most collectors settle for almanacs from the 19th-20th centuries, which not only are fairly common in the marketplace, but also generally are not too expensive (and often have attractive covers as well):
Serious collectors also will want to have on their shelves titles such as Perkins' Australian Almanacs 1806-1930: a Bibliography; Drake's 2-vol. Almanacs of the United States; Capp's Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800; O' Neal's Early American Almanacs: the Phelps Collection, 1679-1900; and similar titles:
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