2000 - december

A History of Almanacs

Back in the old days, if you wanted to find out about weather forecast, the expected harvest, or simply wanted to have a good read, all you had to do was to open up and page through a little book kept with care by many people all through the year.

Almanacs provided ample reading material for the entire year. The main role of Almanacs was to show the progress of time. The first annual Almanacs were published at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, and soon afterwards additional parts were appended to the original content. They included practical advice for many topics of everyday life by the end of the 16th century. Hungarian Almanacs consisted of two parts. The first contained a calendar with months, weeks and days, also a list of Saints' days, and information about the course of the Sun, the changes of the Moon, and about the aptitude of days for certain activities, mainly related to health. In addition, readers could entertain themselves with rhymed sayings, still included in the first half of the Almanac.
The second part, called Appendix, included projections for the weather, the harvest and even for wars. Some advice about nourishment, health regulations, and economic guidelines were also included in this part. The Chronicle, recording events of the previous year, became an inseparable part of Hungarian Almanacs after 1613. This was also connected to the current year and it was included in the Current Events section. Later on, some short stories and educational writings were added to Almanacs, which were gradually becoming thicker and increasingly substantial, also including the dates and times for markets and postal services.

This lasted until the 1730s, when the importance and length of astrological predictions started to decrease to the benefit of literature. A regulation on calendars was introduced in 1777, prohibiting the publication of folk myths and superstitious predictions, stipulating that experts and university professors must write scientific articles. The coat of arms and detailed description of the family of current rulers also became part of the Almanacs.
The annual print run of Almanacs was up to approximately 80,000 in these years, which was a high figure at the time. They were the only publications carrying news in Hungarian - a newspaper called Magyar Hírmondó (Hungarian Courier) was launched only in 1780, and the print run of Hungarian weeklies hardly reached 1,000 until 1820. A total of 19 printers produced 29 different Almanacs in 1822, with a total print run of 3,000. Almanacs were launched at the end of the summer, beginning of autumn, in order to enable people living in the remotest parts of the country to receive them in time. The first people receiving the Almanacs were residents of Pest, where the "Almanac fair" held in August was always a great success.