Almanacs and Day Planners

And we have talked a little bit about these topics before. We talked about almanacs a little bit on our episode on Benjamin Banneker, and we have certainly talked about calendars before a few times, but one you may remember is our episode about the French Republican calendar. But I really found myself wondering specifically about day planners recently because I was setting up my twenty twenty four to one and

I was getting excited. It has droids on it. We love it because I still love a physical paper planner. I know not everyone does, and some people have transitioned over to digital. But I started to wonder about when people started using actual planners, and that really means that we have to talk about almanacs because the two are kind of tightly linked in how one led to the other.

And so here we are today. If you're making your planner, I hope this is a good listening material for you to review the basics and almanac normally contains things like a calendar, times for the sunrise and sunset, astronomical information, tides, climate, holidays, festivals, that kind of thing. You can make a comparison of an almanac being kind of like an analog version of

a smartphone for people living in pre digital times. Of course, there are still almanacs a day, including some that have their own web pages, which is a little funny to me. So everything you might need to know in terms of time, weather, winter, plants, that was all in the almanac, so folks had a ready reference to stay informed on those kinds of things. So the roots of almanacs are found in calendars that had notations correlated to dates those date back all the

way to ancient Egypt. These calendars were tied very closely to the activity of the Nile River, as it was the cornerstone of survival, so the phases of flood, spring, and low water, which was also the harvest period were all noted alongside marking the days. In Egyptians of the time understood the lunar cycle, and they had marked the idea of twelve cycles in a year, but the three seasons of the Nile may have really been the more important markers to their calendar. This is actually a matter

of debate among historians. But the period of flood ran from fall to midwinter. Spring, which was also called emergence sometimes when you see people talking about it today, was from midwinter so like January, to late spring around May, and then what they called their harvest encompassed summer and

into the autumn. But these weren't fixed dates, because the movements of the Nile could shift year to year, and predictions of those shifts would be baked into the calendar, although that meant that there was a little bit of variability. On average, the year ended up following three hundred and sixty five days as we recognize it today, but there were some that were a little longer and a little shorter.

We don't know exactly when this way of tracking the year began, but there are rudimentary versions going back to three thousand BCE. Ancient Greek and Roman calendars also incorporated culturally important information along with the days and the years, things like feasts, days that were likely to bring good fortune or bad. While we don't have surviving examples of Greek almanacs, they were mentioned specifically by the mathematical commentator

Theon of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth century. He incidentally was the father of Hypatia. Yeah, I feel like in doing an episode about calendars and almanacs, we bump up against so many of our Yeah, it's a two other things we've talked about. Yeah. So, then the fasti, which means days, was sort of a Roman list version of an almanac. Fastidias, for example, translates to lawful days, and that list indicated what days it was legal to

conduct various kinds of business. Fasti sacri were lists of sacred days, and Roman religious leaders were responsible for mapping out the various important times of the years, including religious festivals and observations. Then, according to the eighteen ninety Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, at some point a scribe is said to have completely broken with tradition and published the calendar used by the priests of Rome for the

public to see. Sometimes this is described as displaying tablets. It's very dramatic. And then it was kind of like time had become democratized in that moment, and this catalyzed the development of a common calendar that included a more comprehensive collection of information. The Chinese tung Shing is an almanac full of dates that are auspicious for various activities and occasions. The lore around its origins attributes the creation of the first one to the mythical Yellow Emperor around

twenty six hundred BCE. This is a version of an almanac that has endured to present day, although the format of it has evolved a number of times. Yeah, my understanding is that people will still sometimes consult it to pick out things like wedding days or other important days for their family. The compilation, though, of these various types of information, so combining astronomy, climate, holidays, etc. Into one source for personal use, is credited to the Arabic speaking world.

The word almanac means climate in Arabic, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word almanac originates as a Spanish Arabic word in the Middle Ages, although its specific point of origin is unknown. This is all a little bit disputed, though, because it may have been a misinterpretation or a borrow word that was adopted into European use. It appears in medieval Latin as almanac with a K, and it wasn't used in the sense we know it

today definitively until the thirteenth century. That mention is from twelve seventy six, when English philosopher Roger Bacon published his book Opus Majus. That year, he suggested that the word be adopted for use when referring to tables of astronomical information.

One of the reasons there's some fuzziness here is because the first almanac is usually credited to a man named Abuashak Ibrahim ibn Yaya al Nakash al to Gb al Zarkali, who lived and worked on the Iberian Peninsula in the Muslim ruled region known as al Andalous, so broadly within Spain today. Al Zarkali was born in ten twenty nine during the Islamic Golden Age, which just came up in our episode on the Banu Musa. Al Zarkali was an astronomer and an astrologer, and in ten eighty eight he

wrote what's now called the Almanac of Zarkali. It's believed to have been based on a Greek work, but the information in it regarding astronomical information as local to Toledo, where al Zarkali lived and worked. The first mass printed European almanac was the work of Johannes Mueller von Koenigsberg, better known as Reggiomontans. He was born on June sixth,

fourteen thirty six in Koenigsburg, Germany. Became a well known and respected mathematician and astronomer, and he was eventually employed by the Vatican. He also became a printer and he produced his all E Femeritus Abbano starting in fourteen seventy four. Although Reggio Montanas died two years later, his almanac continued until fifteen oh six, twenty three years after the first of the Reggio Montanas almanacs, France's first almanac was produced.

That was the fourteen ninety three Calendar of Shepherds. This book became very popular and was soon picked up for publication in Geneva as well, and then it was translated badly by all accounts, into Scott's Dialect for publication in England in fifteen oh three that remained in print in

England continuously until sixteen thirty one. This particular almanac had the types of things that we mentioned already astronomical tables, seasons, planting and feast days, plus medical information, poetry and biblical contents. One of the versions of the Calendar of Shepherds that

was published in England was produced by Richard Pinson. Pinson was born in France in Normandy, and after he moved to London, he became one of the city's most prominent printers, and in his fifteen oh six version of the Calendar of Shepherds, Pinson wrote that it had been translated into

quote corrupt English and not by no english Man. Pinson claimed that he had his edition newly translated, although according to a two thousand and three paper on the Calendar of Shepherds by Martha W. Driver, none of the English language versions were direct translations. Some passages were completely different new information, including one edition that included kind of what amounted to an illustrated diet and fitness plan allegedly used

by shepherds. Pinson was by the way, appointed Henry the Ace printer just a few years after his first version of the Calendar of Shepherds was published in fifteen sixty five. Joaquim Hubri's An Almanac and Prognostication for the Year of Our Lord God fifteen sixty five, serving for all Europia and all so most necessary for all students, merchants, mariners and travelers both by sea and land, composed and gathered by Joaquin Hubride, doctor in physic Also the most principal

fairs in England. Very necessary for people that do resort to the same uh. That's when I came out in fifteen sixty five. This gives a sense of how much these had become seen and marketed as repositories of basically all the vital information a person would need to get through a given year. Coming up, we're going to talk about the first almanac that was printed in the British colonies of North America, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. The first almanac published in Britain's North

American colonies was published by mariner Captain William Pierce. Pierce arrived in Boston in sixteen thirty two just two years after the city founding, and seven years later he produced his Almanac, which was an almanac for New England for the year sixteen thirty nine. By this time, almanacs were becoming recognized as important tools, and in sixteen forty seven Harvard published an almanac compiled by one of its fellows,

Samuel Danforth. Danforth born in sixteen twenty six was an astronomer, mathematician, Puritan minister, and a poet, and his almanac reflects these various disciplines. His first almanac had an essay that played out throughout the book, at the bottom of each page or each section, where he shared his thoughts about calendars and the heavens, and then in subsequent years he abandoned the essay and instead wrote poems to put at the

end of each month. These are considered secular poems, although his Puritan religion and morality is ever present in them. For example, one of his brief June poems reads, who digged this spring of gardens? Here? Whose mudded streams at last run clear? Why should we such water drink? Give loosers what they list to think? Yet no one god,

one faith professed to be new England's interest. Samuel Danforth also included in his almanac a chronological table of some few memorable occurrences, which was not a predictive model of what to expect in the year, but instead a very brief history of the twenty year old Massachusetts Bay Colony. Some of these are historically fascinating and the insights that they offer into dan Forth's views of events that we

see very differently today. For example, in January of sixteen thirty eight, the only note is quote Missus Hutchinson and her errors banished. We talked about Ann Hutchinson earlier this year in our episode on Mary Dyer and her two trials were involved and had multiple facets, so it's interesting that dan Forth notes it with just this five words, very minimal. Most of his history is this way. An entire years news and events are boiled down to just

a few sentences. Vanforth Almanac was popular and continued for quite a number of years, although not with him. He gave the almanac to another person after a few years when he was offered a pastor position away from Harvard. During the time that North America was in the early stages of making print. Almanac's mainstream, there was a very interesting and different kind of almanac being produced in England. This type, called a kloague almanac, didn't originate in England.

It had actually been in use in Scandinavian countries for a long time before it had this surge in popularity in England. So a cloague almanac is a wooden rod that's squared so that it has four distinct sides, and each side represents a quarter of the year, with the days marked by notches along the edge, so when it's held by the handle, it's red from the bottom to

the top. And then there are runes and other symbols that are carved into the cloague at points on each face of the rod to notate the various happenings in the season, in the year. And these were obviously not paper. They were something that would last, and they were meant to be used for more than one year, so they didn't reflect projections of a coming year, but more like here are the standard patterns you can expect, and they

served both a practical and sometimes decorative purpose. Is they were also sometimes designed to be hung or otherwise displayed in the home. I'm imagining this as kind of a calendar yardstick. It's much shorter than that, though, it's like a thing you can easily hold in your hand. There are examples of them in museums, and they're like less than a foot long. They're not that big. Okay, to

move on. Samuel Atkins prepared an almanac for sixteen eighty six titled Calendarium Pennsylvanians or America's Messenger, being an almanac for the year of Grace sixteen eighty six, where it has contained both the English and foreign account the motions of the planets through the signs, with the luminaries, conjunctions, aspects, eclipses, the ride, southing and setting of the moon, with the time when she passeth by or is with the most eminent fixed stars, sun rising and setting in the time

of high water at the city of Philadelphia, et cetera. With chronologies and many other notes, rules and tables, very fitting for every man to know and have, all which is accommodated to the longitude of province of Pennsylvania and latitude of forty degrees north, with a table of houses for the same which may indifferently serve New England, New York East, and West Jersey, Maryland, and most parts of Virginia.

This is a good indicator that almanacs were also becoming more and more localized, and they just wanted you to know that everything's in here, you guys. In seventeen hundred, Vaux Stellarum the Voice of the Stars was published in England by Stationers Company. And this was an almanac written by Francis Moore, who was an astrologer, so it had a lot of astrology in it. It came to be

known as Old Moore's Almanac, and that is still in publication. It, like many other almanacs, started to include more and more different kinds of material, including things like humor and short form fiction and medical advice, et cetera, making it not only a reference book but also a source of entertainment. I think this is sort of what like the Old Farmer's Almanac also eventually yes into, which is I think the thing that people might have seen the most around

in the United States today. Following the popularity of Vox Stillarum, there was a massive surge in the number of almanac titles in North America. The seventeen twenties and thirties were the time when several popular almanacs began publication. This included the Astronomical Diary in Almanac, which started in seventeen twenty

five by a Massachusetts teenager named Nathaniel Ames. Nathaniel went on to become a physician, but he was only seventeen when he first produced his almanac, and that continued for fifty years. After Nathaniel died in seventeen sixty four, his

son continued to publish the work for another decade. Yeah, apparently when Nathaniel died there was this slight panic in the family because it was such a popular thing and a source of income that they saw other publishers kind of like thinking they would move in and claim that they were the new Nathaniel Ames Almanac, and his son

was like, I'm just going to take this over. James Franklin put out the Rhode Island Almanac in seventeen twenty eight, five years before his more famous brother Benjamin started his own almanac under the pen name Richard Saunders. Poor Richard's Almanac, of course, became very successful, and it sold consistently for more than twenty five years, offering Franklin a platform to share his thoughts on a wide array of subjects, plenty

of which is really cringey by today's standards. But Ben Franklin not only jumped into a very crowded market with his almanac, he was really successful, and he was one of the few that managed to keep publication going through the Revolutionary War and beyond. Franklin met the demands of his audience to do so through things like adding some

blank pages. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute, or introducing small editions that were marketed to women and were described as being able to easily fit into a woman's handbag. The first nautical almanac, which was Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris, was released in

seventeen sixty six. This ties into another old episode of ours from twenty fourteen on the discovery of longitude, because the information in the almanac, which was published by the Astronomer Royal of England, enabled determination of longitude using the

calculation of lunar distance. Nautical almanacs have since been published around the world, and in nineteen twelve the US Congress voted to share data, meaning in the most immediate sense that the British Nautical Office formed in eighteen thirty two and the US Nautical Office formed in eighteen forty nine could work together to publish consistent information. Yeah, up to that point they were both putting out almanacs, and sometimes

they weren't saying the same thing. And since those are nautical and meant to travel, you can't be as localized. Specialized almanacs also started to appear. Just as today there are calendars for cat lovers or fans of specific movies or TV shows, there were almanacs that aimed at specific demographics, like religious or social club affiliations. Some almanacs were also

used as a way to promote ideas. The American Anti Slavery Almanac ran from eighteen thirty six to eighteen forty three as a way for the American Anti Slavery Society to show people the realities of slavery. That almanac included the calendar and statistical information that other almanacs did, but it also included writing and imagery to convince more people to join the abolitionist movement, including illustrations of black people, both enslaved and free, being tortured or being poorly treated.

And this was apparently quite shocking to some readers. Notable anti slavery activists were involved in this almanacs editing and publication over the years, including William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Mariah Child. Okay, so how does this translate into day planners? We'll talk about that after we hear from the sponsors that keep things running here at Stuff You Muss and History Class. Even before there was anything labeled as a planner,

there were planners. Most people were using their almanacs this way, often noting down important happenings in their lives or business dealings on the pages of the copy they were already carrying around with them, because yes, people carried them around with them. As almanacs became indispensable to daily life, they just were the most obvious place to jot things down.

In addition to people just starting to write in the margins of their almanac's, booksellers and publishers started to address the demand for writing space and almanacs by including blank pages. Sometimes these would be bound in right along with the content, and then other times tipped in after the book had been assembled. Earlier, we mentioned Joaquin Hubris and Almanac and Prognostication for the year fifteen sixty five, but that was

not his only almanac. He also created one that he called Blank and Perpetual that was intended to give users a place to write down things like transactions that they wanted to track or other events worth noting throughout the year. Some other almanacs started to include blank space in the form of a free column included in the tables, or even whole blank pages, but all at the end of the book, so blank areas that were undefined to be

used at the owner's discretion. Molly McCarthy notes in her twenty thirteen book The Accidental Diarist that the rise in popularity of diary keeping in the eighteen hundreds has roots in the almanacs of the eighteenth century. Writing quote, the commercial success of the pocket diary in the nineteenth century had much to do with the genres and record keeping habits that preceded it. The almanac paved the way for

the daily planner. It accustomed buyers to a kind of writing that was regular but abbreviated, coded in a way that was restrictive but instrumental to a way of seeing and being in the world. Pre made diaries one of a variety of other blank books. Such as scrapbooks, account books, and autograph albums fueled a publishing industry that betrayed a commercial fervor for cheap print that began in the colonial

print shop. So the idea of an almanac diary just brief notes on the day kept in an almanac was different, of course from a diary where a person might share their feelings in secrets, but it followed the form of the almanac, so it just listed facts and events as a sort of record. There's also this secondary aspect guarding diary keeping and almanacs that's linked to economic class that

was in play historically. So when it was common for people to start using their almanacs as diaries, people with more money could pay to have extra blank pages tipped in. So even putting one's thoughts on paper in any kind of expansive way became something of a luxury. If you only have a brief column and you can't afford more paper to be added, you got to keep things brief.

Over time, though, both demand for more notation space and a drop in the reputation of the almanac led to the various facts, tables and title information being supplanted by more blank pages until Finally, somebody had the thought to produce a calendar that was intended primarily for writing in was a date book. In seventeen forty eight, Robert Dodsley of London printed a new memoranda book for the following year.

This is a small book that had space for financial transactions as well as appointments and notes, and it became very popular in England, so much so that other publishers started producing them, and then one publisher got the idea that someone should sell them in North America, and that person was publisher Robert Aitken. Aitkin was born in Scotland in seventeen thirty four and emigrated to the Colonies around

seventeen seventy. I saw different years for this. From seventeen sixty nine to seventeen seventy one he set up a printing shop in Philadelphia, and just a few years after he got there he produced the complete annual account book and calendar for the Pocket or Desk for seventeen seventy three. This date book wasn't completely devoid of some of the tables found in almanacs. It had those, but it was secondary.

It really just had a lot more blank pages. Fifty two of them, so one spread for each week, and they were laid out in a way that the user could easily scan the whole week, so it was easy to write down things like appointments and then reference them again later. That was something that was less fluid and smooth if you were writing appointment on a page that shared space with things like planetary movements, the moon phases,

and weather predictions. On the left page of a two page spread for the week, there was a grid laid out to note expenses and income, and then on the right hand side it had dated cells to write whatever was pertinent to any given day. It sounds revolutionary and it was, except not many people were into it. It was such a departure from the way people had been accustomed to noting their days that they needed to have it explained to them that explanation was included in the book.

People were just not really ready for the idea of writing down things that were going to happen in the future. They were accustomed to and content with, noting what had already happened on a given day. If they did want to record more thoughts, they tended to keep those in a separate, dedicated diary that wasn't tied to any kind of calendar. Plus, all those blank pages made Aitken's annual hard to carry around, even though it was still relatively small.

When Akin published a follow up book in seventeen seventy four, he made it an almanac, not a date book, with just a few blank pages, and then he ultimately dropped those as well, although he continued working as a publisher. Yeah, he kind of gave up on the whole almanac date book thing. But obviously, date books with formats very similar

to Aitkins were eventually adopted in the US. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, their popularity in Great Britain had finally kind of worked its way over to North America. If Eitkin had lived twenty years past his death in eighteen oh two, he would have seen the surge and popularity of those books. They became almost a little bit of a fad, and then people quickly realized the benefit of having a record and planner close at hand.

How this fad popped up is difficult to track, but one contributor was really just a simple matter of materials. Paper had become more readily available, so printers could print more different products and charge less, meaning they were there was a greater chance that those products would find customers. During the US Civil War, date books were issued to Union soldiers, and once the war ended, pocket planners became even more popular. They spread from metropolitan areas to less

densely populated towns. These also started to reflect a shift in the way people lived, as they had columns for bill due dates, spaces for addresses of friends and acquaintances and appointments, as well as notes. But what wasn't there was all the almanac data, as that part had shrunk out of the pages. The popularity of the date book

had increased. The date book became so popular that by the end of the nineteenth century, Montgomery Ward introduced a product called the Standard Diary, which was meant to offer anyone the chance to fully account for their time and finances. This rise in popularity of date books, which were called everything from diaries to pocketbooks too, still sometimes almanacs et cetera, had this questionable effect that we are all still grappling

with today. Right planner consumers started to consider how to make the most of their time because they started to think about time differently. When your time is noted in the margins of something like an almanac and how your day played out. It may seem a little bit secondary to a larger picture, but when it's the focus of an entire blank book, you are almost certain to think about it with more gravity, and it changed the way

that people thought about their days and about themselves. As the twentieth century began, date books once again evolved, as they had become so integral to daily life that branded versions, which were essentially advertisement vehicles, started to pop up. Department stores would give away free planners that had ads throughout their pages, just as almanacs had included everything from patent

medicine ads to calls for abolition. Planners with marketing also became common, and of course, the twentieth century also saw wide diversification of planners. Today, design variations abound, from what's featured on the cover to how planning is managed within the pages. There are general planners, goal setting planners, planners for specific activities like running or sewing, or even how

many books you read. Business Research Insights reports that in twenty twenty two, the diaries and planners market was worth more than a billion dollars. That's a billion with a b and it's projected to reach almost one point five billion by twenty thirty one. And this actually shows a big bounce back from a drop that happened during pandemic lockdown.

And it's interesting because it also shows growth despite digital options due to people valuing what the report calls a disciplined lifestyle and a new surge in the popularity of diary keeping. So things are evolving, but we're just repeating everything that's come before, so I hope you know we also I will note this cover primarily like English language

diaries and almanacs. Sure, we'll talk about one little factoid I came across in my research that I couldn't really find a lot of information in another language, and we'll get to that in our behind the scenes, But right now I have a little listener mail and then we'll go finish our recovery from our New Year's Eve celebrations. This is about Masons, which we talked about on our William Morgan episodes. This is from our listener, Greg who writes, Hi,

Holly and Tracy. I found your podcast on the abduction of William Morgan fascinating, not only the story itself, but because my dad was a Mason, and he was always a bit vague about it. He was a successful small town businessman and sometime in the nineteen seventies he was invited to join the Masons. As a kid, I always wanted to wear his sparkly red fez hat with the long tassel, which we still have to this day. He never really told me much about it, except that it

was a social group. Over time, he became an inactive member. I asked him why he stopped going, and it really just came down to social circles. He and Mom were flower lovers. Dad hybridized iris and day lilies, and they found their participation in flower clubs more fun for them. Okay, I'm kind of in awe of your dad right now, Greg, but the Masons were very good to my dad. There is a rule in the Masonic organization that they will take care of any Mason who lives long enough to

run out of money. This was the case with my dad, who lived to be ninety two despite his savings. We all know the high cost of living and assisted living drains as savings quickly. That's where the Masons came in once Dad was out of money. Obviously, not counting his monthly Social Security benefits. The Masons stepped in and they paid Dad's expenses until he passed. This was probably six to eight months worth of expenses. Our family will forever

be grateful to the kindness of Masons. Uh, that's a great story. I love it attached is it two for one? It's a picture of Greg's dad and his cat, Priscilla. Priscilla liked to take rides on my dad's walker. My parents had three cats, and they knew when it was bedtime. Dad would call them and they would run in and beat him to the bed. Once they knew he was asleep, they would get up and do their nightly kiddy things. Then they would be bedside at five am for when

Dad woke up. All of my parents' kiddies were the best. When it was time to move Dad to assisted living, two of the kiddies found good homes and the third, his favorite, decided to cross the Rainbow Bridge. I'm sorry you lost your dad. He sounds amazing. And this is the cutest picture I've ever seen. It's so funny because the cat is just like, this is my conveyance now. I love it so much, and the cat is adorable

and your dad sounds like a wonderful person. If you would like to write to us make me cry a little bit, you can do that at History History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History and if you have not yet subscribed, you can do that on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere that you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

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