Our tradition of starting the new year off with historical almanacs on display in our Collection Spotlight case continues this year. We're featuring both the 1771 and 1778 editions of
An Astronomical Diary; Or, Almanack by Nathanael Low.
These are the only two issues of Nathanael Low’s almanac in our collection, though he began publishing them in 1762 and continued into the 1800s. We are displaying our two copies closed and with facsimiles of the January pages so that we can highlight a small detail found on their respective front covers. Published leading up to and then during the Revolutionary War, 1771 is listed as "In the XIth (eleventh year) of the Reign of King George III" and then 1778 is described as "The second Year of American Independence, which began July fourth, 1776." As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Independence this year, it is moving to see this contemporaneous and significant change in wording.
The 1771 edition was printed and sold by Kneeland & Adams on Milk Street in Boston and the 1778 edition was printed by J. Gill on Court Street and T. & J. Fleet on Cornhill, all locations that are near the State House. On the cover of the 1771 almanac, Low lists the contents as containing information about eclipses, lunations, sun’s and moon’s risings and settings, courts in the four New-England Governments, feasts and fasts of the church, spring tides, judgement of the weather, time of high water, roads with the best stages or houses to put up at, some necessary rules with regard to health, and many other things useful and entertaining. These almanacs seem like a one-stop shop for all your needs in the 18th century! The header for each month also includes a few lines of verse from various poems, spread out over a few months. January leads off with the first few lines of “Friendship: An Ode” by Samuel Johnson.
The 1778 edition includes much of the same practical information, but does begin with an address to the reader, on monopoly and extortion, in regard to the war that was being waged at the time of publication. While the young country was united in its feelings of patriotism and a shared enemy against the British, the essay draws a critical eye to the personal gain that some were making from the war, writing that “it is the poor chiefly that feel the calamitous effects of monopoly and extortion; tho’ it is evidence these men were never more necessary than now, never more useful, and their services were never yet of greater importance. Surely such men are worthy of some notice. They claim some attention. They deserve all possible encouragements.”
Almanacs largely included practical information or republished poems/verses from other sources, but they did also grant the author some leeway to include personal essays and anecdotes that were of interest, like the 1778 essay, which gives each almanac in our collection a slightly different slant. Nathanael Low was a physicist and astronomer who lived in Ipswich, Massachusetts before removing to South Berwick, Maine (which would have been part of Massachusetts at the time). He enlisted in the war in 1780, serving from Berwick. His home, built in 1786, is part of the South Berwick Village District, and you can read more on the Old Berwick Historical Society
webpage.
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| January's pages from the 1771 edition (left) and 1778 (right) |
Last year, these two volumes, along with other 18th and 19th century almanacs from our Special Collections holdings, were sent to the Northeast Document Conservation Center in Andover, Massachusetts to receive conservation treatment. They were cleaned and mended and then rehoused in custom enclosures. Their original binding remains intact and they are still somewhat fragile for handling, but while at NEDCC for treatment, they were also digitized and will be added to our digital repository in the coming months, making them available for researchers to examine them remotely (and safely).
If you are in the Boston area, then be sure to visit the library from January 6 through February 3 to see these almanacs on display, and catch up on all of past almanac posts
here.
Elizabeth Roscio
Preservation Librarian
