-- The techniques employed by the
almanacs to make predictions are secretive so they cannot be objectively evaluated for their scientific credibility.
The Old Farmer's
Almanac, a derivation of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's
Almanac,'' was first published in 1792, and went on to become one of the most successful
almanacs in North American history.
"They gave us the inspiration to research into not only his life and business dealings, but also the
almanacs he started in 1903.
Over the years,
almanacs have been suggesting the do's and don'ts
As will be recalled, Faith Eckler reported in the May 2011 Word Ways that Jeff Grant had discovered that this riddle first appeared, attributed to one Miss Eliza Hurst, in the 1782 edition of the Ladies' Diary
almanac, where it was the first in a group of riddles entitled "New Enigmas to be answered in next Year's Diary." Jeff found an online a copy of this
almanac in a book entitled Collection of English
Almanacs for the years 1702-1835 on the Google Books website; it was said to be copyrighted, and consequently only the first two lines of the riddle were permitted to be read.
Both
almanacs, these are The United States Working Man's Almanack.
Explain that atlases and
almanacs need to be updated often, because borders, governments, populations, and other data change.
Almanacs also listed the times, destination and starting-place of stagecoaches, as well as the collecting points and times of the mail.
These are the divinatory
almanacs, sometimes combined with protocols for ritual or cosmogonies that soothsayers used to maintain the vital links between men and the gods.
In a series of retrospective comments on previous
Almanacs, published online in 2003, Barone admits that the readers he first had in mind were "teenage boys, the kind who are often dismissed as nerds." (The author's note in the 1974
Almanac, when Barone was along-haired 29-year-old, declares that "for almost twenty years he has been a close student of political and demographic data.") Much like that other feast for adolescent monomaniacs that came out of the 1970s, Bill James Baseball Abstract, behind the reams of data in the
Almanac lies both a theory of the game and an ideal player.
Although
almanacs as a genre are far too diverse to be summed up in a single article, one broad textual trend is discernible in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
almanacs and serves as my central focus here: the tendency of these texts to provide complicated and precise descriptions of both place and time.
The Government Affairs staff unveiled its Issue
Almanacs in 2006.
