The Farmer's Almanack, Calculated on a New and Improved Plan, for the Year of Our Lord 1846: Being 2d After Bissextile or Leap Year, and 70th of Am. Independence (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Farmer's Almanack, Calculated on a New a...)
Excerpt from The Farmer's Almanack, Calculated on a New and Improved Plan, for the Year of Our Lord 1846: Being 2d After Bissextile or Leap Year, and 70th of Am. Independence
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Facsimiles Of Ten Selected Pages From The First Three Numbers Of The Farmer's Almanac: Since 1848 The Old Farmer's Almanac (1917)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Robert Bailey Thomas was an American founder, editor, and publisher of the Farmer's Almanack.
Background
Robert was born at Grafton, Massachussets, in 1766. He was the son of William and Azubah (Goodale) Thomas. Both his father and his grandfather were men of some education; the grandfather, William Thomas, emigrated from Wales about 1718 and about 1720 settled in Marblehead.
Young Thomas grew up in Sterling (later West Boylston), Massachussets, where his father was a farmer and a schoolmaster.
Education
Although it was intended that he should go to Harvard, he preferred self-education, which consisted of reading all the books in his father's library. Among these was James Ferguson's Astronomy Explained (1756), which first gave him the idea of "calculating an Almanack. " But at sixteen he realized that he lacked the necessary mathematical background for astronomical computations, so he temporarily followed in his father's footsteps and became a school-teacher. He left this occupation almost immediately to become an apprentice bookbinder, and at twenty-four took the first step toward his goal. He had been studying mathematics and astronomy; now he hired a printer, N. Coverly, to print a thousand copies of a spelling book – William Perry's The Only Sure Guide to the English Tongue; or, New Pronouncing Spelling Books (1790) – bound them himself, and sold them to the country schools. With the profits he paid his tuition in and attended a mathematics school in Boston run by Osgood Carleton, an almanac-maker.
Career
In 1792, when a printer, Carleton, retired, he stepped into the breach with an almanac of his own – shrewdly titled The Farmer's Almanac for the Year of Our Lord 1793 (1792). It was afterwards called The Farmer's Almanack, and later The Old Farmer's Almanack. This was a success from the start, mainly because Thomas knew his audience, an intelligent group of well-to-do farmers.
His realization of the intelligence of his readers led him into an unprecedented and heretical departure from the science of almanac-making--the omission of the Homo Signorum (Man of the Zodiac). He considered astrology quackery, and thought the stars followed their courses with no influence on the life of man. Consequently, he omitted the conventionalized figure of the naked man surrounded by the zodiacal signs, which were connected by arrows to the organs of the body each had under its especial care. The zodiacal signs themselves he did not omit. With characteristic shrewdness, however, he translated them into the terms of the farmer's daily life. Gemini, the Twins, were no longer Castor and Pollux, but two farmers walking through a field of wheat. In Thomas' Almanack all questions of the day were touched upon: slavery, the Indian wars, witchcraft, the morality of the theatre, and the condition of the post roads. These discussions were larded with agricultural advice, poetry, and philosophical comment, homely epigrams and pointed wit, some culled from the classics but more being of Thomas' own production.
Among maps of the traveled roads between Quebec and Savannah, too, there might appear stanzas of doggerel exuding the patriotic zeal of the new Union, or an imposing list of the "First-line ships of the American Navy, " thrillingly set down in order of their complement of guns, for in those feverish days patriotic material never failed to arouse interest.
By 1803 the Almanack was ten years along the road of success. It was sold in Boston, Salem, New York, and Philadelphia, but the bulk of the sales was in the backwoods reached by itinerant pack pedlars, whose books formed the literary "circulating" libraries of the day. Thomas' accounts show that in the decade 1820-30 more than 200, 000 copies were sold by these men to outlying readers. In 1837, by popular demand, Thomas ran a woodcut of himself – a Pickwickian, roundfaced character, as healthy and hearty as the Almanack itself. A memoir of his life appeared in the Almanack in the years 1833-37 and 1839.
In the spring of 1846, putting aside a proof sheet of his Almanack for 1847, and remarking that his eyes were dim "from reading such a quantity of fine print, " Thomas went to his room, lay down, and in a little while quietly died. In his will he entrusted further publication of the Almanack to two nephews, in whose hands it stayed until 1904.