Als man zelt nach Christi geburt MCCCCC un[d] XV; das drit nach dem hüppfend[e]n Jar... [Almanac for 1515]

Augsburg: Johann Schönsperger the Younger, 1515 [1514?]

2 broadsides | Full-sheet | ~360 x 260 mm per sheet

A remarkably early double-sheet broadside almanac WITH BLOODLETTING INSTRUCTIONS, UNRECORDED as best we can tell, and AMONG THE EARLIEST ALMANACS USING THE MISE-EN-PAGE THAT WOULD DOMINATE THE CENTURY: a calendar in multiple columns and printed on two sheets, one pasted beneath the other across the short dimension, and surrounded by a cohesive, programmatic suite of woodcut illustrations. The illustration and layout of these almanacs evolved since their debut in the 15th century, when the two sheets were more commonly adhered along the long edge and illustration was seldom more than a few woodcuts—the Zodiac Man, a basic eclipse diagram, maybe a saint or two—the sides occupied by more generic border pieces (if anything). Coats of arms were common among these early almanac border suites, eventually eclipsed by biblical scenes and seasonal vignettes. A quick review of other examples from the earliest years of the 16th century will put ours in context: 1503, 1503, 1505, 1508, 1508, 1509, 1515, 1515, and 1521 for a slightly later example, also surrounded by coats of arms. ¶ Our title includes some standard chronological markers frequently found in early almanacs, among them the year's golden number (15), marking its place in the 19-year Metonic lunar cycle; its dominical letter (G), which links dates to their days of the week; and its place in the indiction period (3), a 15-year tax assessment cycle that dates from antiquity. A variety of other chronological markers follow, these of perhaps greater utility for the average person. For example, we're informed there are seven weeks and six days between Christmas (Weynachten) and Fastnacht (Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday to us), or six days between Candlemas (Liechtmess) and Fastnacht; and Corpus Christi (Fronleichnamßtag), a feast Luther's Germany would not have tolerated, falls on the Thursday following the feast day of St. Boniface. Next is a legend explaining the various symbols used in the calendar, standard almanac types that would endure for centuries. ¶ Then comes the bread and butter of any almanac: the monthly calendar. This provides each day's date; its dominical letter, indicating the day of the week (1515 began on a Monday, with dominical letter a); saints celebrated, with notable feast days in red; and a zodiac sign paired with a number 0 through 29, indicating the lunar epact, or the moon's nightly position in the 30 degrees of each zodiac (the moon shifts 12-13 degrees each day). Additional details include the moon phase, represented by dots and crescents (black dot is a new moon, red dot is a full moon); a handful of small symbols to guide certain activities (red double cross for the best days to let blood, single red cross for middling days, black asterisk for when to take medicine, a little red fleuron for days to plant, something like a red mushroom for days to bathe). ¶ At bottom is a woodcut Zodiac Man indicating the best, middling, and worst times to let blood (lassen) from various parts of the body, and when to take different forms of medicine (pills, drinks, etc.). Coming from an earlier manuscript tradition, this kind of woodcut was first paired with an almanac in 1484, likely in Strasbourg, and became a fixture for such bloodletting guides. Note especially the slots cut in our wood block to admit labels set with movable type. Further bloodletting and medicinal instructions appear left of the woodcut. The text to its right notes a lunar eclipse to begin the Tuesday before Candlemas (Liechtmess; there was a total lunar eclipse on February 9 that year). At top center are the arms of the Holy Roman Empire, with numerous additional coats of arms surrounding the calendar. Finally, we note the colophon, actually dated 1515. Such broadside almanacs were typically printed shortly before January 1 of their intended year of use, and usually lack a year in the colophon. ¶ Produced in vast numbers but quick to disappear, almanacs were indispensable to early modern Europe, second in volume only to the mass of religious literature that poured from European presses, and were unsurprisingly among the first products issued from Europe's presses. A 1458 bloodletting calendar in the type of the 36-line Bible survives, for example, and these ephemeral pieces remained a staple of print culture throughout the hand-press period. “Published in considerable numbers according to an annual cycle, these singular amalgams of the quotidian and the celestial seldom survive in more than one copy," like the present, and "most have disappeared altogether. But they were a hugely profitable part of the book market” (Pettegree). If we take the 22,000-copy press run of Valentin Geissler’s 1558 Nuremberg broadsheet almanac as anything near typical, then these ephemeral publications should rank among the most fleeting artifacts of early print culture, understandably discarded or repurposed as waste after the year’s end. ¶ We're hopelessly addicted to the special blend of symbol and brief text that characterized early almanacs, rendering at least some of their content accessible to even the completely illiterate. “By its very nature the almanac was open to a plural readership, for it provided a written text for those who knew how to read and signs or images to be deciphered for those who did not....A book [or broadside] to be used and to be used in multiple ways, the almanac intertwined signs and written text like no other book. It seems the quintessential book for a society still unequally used to the written word and in which many different relationships with print undoubtedly existed, ranging all the way from fluent reading to halting decipherment” (Chartier). Broadsides like these might certainly be found in private homes, but BARBER SURGEONS AND BATHHOUSES ARE LIKELY SITES, too, given the bloodletting content. ¶ The earliest double-broadside almanac we've seen in the trade with this iconic layout. We allow room for error given title variations and the vagaries of cataloging often fragmentary material, but this is the earliest we find in auction records in this particular style.

CONDITION: Printed in red and black on the rectos only of two sheets of unwatermarked paper. ¶ Missing roughly a quarter of the calendar (second halves of February, June, October; first halves of March, July, November); right side lacking the coats of arms and just a few characters of content from each line of the calendar; coats of arms on the left side partially trimmed; removed from an early binding, and so predictably tattered at the edges, but remarkably clean given the fact, with only traces of old adhesive and skinned paper; scattered small burn holes, likely from the attachment of metal furniture to its host binding.

REFERENCES: Andrew Pettegree "Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print: Typology and Typography," Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (Brill, 2017), p. 4, 27-28, 32 27-28; Falk Eisermann, “Fifty Thousand Veronicas: Print Runs of Broadsheets in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” Broadsheets, p. 111 (on the 22,000-copy print run of a 1558 broadsheet almanac); Roger Chartier (Lydia G. Cochrane, tr.), The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), p. 179 (cited above); Geneviève Bollème, Les almanachs populaires aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Mouton, 1969), p. 7 (second only to religious literature), 11 ("the almanac is first a book that one can consult without knowing how to read, it is composed of typographic signs, but also astrological symbols, numbers, images"), 13 (almanacs like these offered "a double possibility of decoding: of course that of the typographical signs, but also that of the astrological symbols alone that at least give them access to a basic but necessary reading to properly govern their lives according to the rhythm of seasonal variations to which they are essentially subjected"); Yann Sordet, Histoire du livre et de l'édition (Michel, 2021), p. 414 ("In pre-industrial European societies, where books remained relatively rare, and in the poorly literate social strata for which they were intended, the almanac nevertheless constituted a sort of 'encyclopedia for all', where one could learn both when to plant trees and celebrate saints, how to care for men and animals, but at the same time open oneself to entertaining literature and a certain knowledge of current events"); Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (Art Institute of Chicago, 2011), p. 73 (“At the heart of the need to locate oneself in time and space was the calendar, one of the many ways man organized time, and one of the first to be printed in the form of books or sheets to be hung on the wall"), 254 (“This [broadside] format would become extremely popular in the second half of the sixteenth century, with numerous versions designed by Jost Amman, among other artists…The down-to-earth occupations mentioned correspond with the status of their owners"); James Raven and Goran Proot, "Renaissance and Reformation," Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (2020), p. 152 (“Almanacs were among the most popular productions of the early printing press, produced annually in hundreds of thousands of copies across Europe. Many were multi-functional with sophisticated and compressed layouts, and included rod and shipping distances, tide times, prognostications and horoscopes, calculating tables, or official and civic information.”); Catarina Zimmermann-Homeyer, "Illustrated Almanacs: Imaging Strategies on Bloodletting Calendars of the Incunabula Period," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch 2022, p. 118 ("In most cases, the almanacs were commissioned by the city council itself. Since the bloodletting was done by barbers and probably also in bathhouses, the calendars were likely to be displayed there. There is also evidence that the bloodletting calendars were hung on the walls of private homes."), 127 (on the first appearance of the Zodiac Man on an almanac), 145 ("In these early decades [15c] of almanac printing, essential illustrative traditions emerged that would remain authoritative for the sixteenth century and would be expanded to include further illustrative elements, for example from heraldry"); Matthew J. Shaw, "Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin: Almanacs and the Atlantic World," Printing History New Series 2 (July 2007), p. 18 ("Almanacs played an intimate part in the shift from a predominantly oral culture, to one in which the authority of print was paramount"), 24 (“almanacs might also be reprinted in January or February with corrections or in response to demand"); Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (1982), p. 70 (reporting wall almanacs in mid-16c Strasbourg belonging to a mine foreman's widow and the administrator of an orphanage)

Item # 822