Almanach unde Practica up dat Jar MDLXXXIX [bound with] Prognosticon op dat Jar na Christi unsers erlösers unde Salichmakers Giebordt MDLXXXIX

by Hector Mithob (Mithobius)

Magdeburg: Wolfgang Kirchner, [1588]

[32]; [26] of [32] p. | A^16; B^16(-B5.12,16)

The only known copy of this German pocket almanac, though Mithob prepared the calculations for a broadside almanac printed at Erfurt the same year. Mithob was the son of a physician and mathematics professor, auspicious parentage for an almanac maker. Hector himself earned his MD from the University of Bologna in 1558. Upon returning from Italy, Eric II, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, appointed him official physician to the court, in which capacity he spent 27 years serving noble patients, in addition to serving as official physician of Hanover since 1568. His father was also an almanac author, with Erfurt productions to his name dating back to at least 1539. ¶ Despite the continuous register and the title—Practica was more or less synonymous with Prognosticon—we suspect the Prognosticon would have been offered separately, as an optional add-on (and likely on its own, too). We find only one other copy of a Mithob Prognosticon, for 1599 at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and its catalog record does not mention an almanac; and of his other bound almanacs that we find, no record mentions a Prognosticon (1571 Almanach; 1571 Schreib-Almanach; Schreibkalenders for 1580, 1583, 1584, 1589, and 1596; and a 1599 Allmanach). Meanwhile, for example, a Prognosticum for 1578 exists as a standalone item at the Austrian National Library, despite a register that suggests 6-8 leaves should have preceded it. ¶ Our title verso bears a number of common annual chronological markers frequently found in early almanacs, including the year's golden number (13), marking its place in the 19-year Metonic lunar cycle; its place in the 28-year solar cycle (2); its dominical letter (E), which links dates to their days of the week; and its place in the indiction period (2), a 15-year tax assessment cycle that dates from antiquity. Mithob also notes the year since the creation of the world (5551), the year since the Noachian Flood (3895), and the time between Christmas and the end of fasting (six weeks, four days). The primary content of the almanac follows, with the daily calendar for each month occupying a two-page spread, preceded by a rather helpful legend for the multitude of symbols scattered throughout the calendar. These monthly charts provide each day's date; its dominical letter, indicating the day of the week (1589 began on a Wednesday, with dominical letter A); saints celebrated, with notable feast days in red; and a zodiac sign paired with a number 0 through 29, providing the moon sign and lunar epact (the moon shifts 12-13 degrees each day). Additional details include the moon phase, represented by tiny moon types (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 (Uterwelt Aderl[assen]), 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); and occasional predictions for the day's weather (frost, dunckel, kolt, regen, etc.). Sundays include a brief instruction for that day's gospel reading. At the end of each month are a few choice historical events, a number of them referring to Martin Luther. Following the calendar is a five-page guide to Germany's markets, listed alphabetically by city and with their meeting times expressed in the liturgical calendar. The Prognosticon that follows provides further astronomical markers for the year and offers a number of astrologically based predictions, touching on the weather, the harvest, complexions (melancholic, etc.), illness, and more. It closes with a multi-page guide to the moon phases of each month.  ¶ Produced in vast numbers but quick to disappear, almanacs were indispensable to early modern Europe, 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). We find the early almanac's unique blend of symbol and brief text hopelessly captivating, rendering at least some of its content accessible to even the most 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. It gave information to some about the schedules of the courts and the markets; it told others about the weather to be expected, offering predictions and horoscopes and precepts and advice in its dual language of illustration and writing. A book 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). ¶ Sixteenth-century broadside almanac runs—and ours, too, was a single-sheet production, albeit folded—could reach five figures. As a category, they're second in volume only to the mass of religious literature that poured from European presses. But the content was generally useless beyond its intended year, leading to their inevitable destruction. In our experience, and this is borne out by auction records, these little pocket almanacs are rarer in trade than their broadsheet cousins—which is saying something, for the broadsides are themselves rather miraculous survivals. The broadsides overwhelmingly survive as binding waste, but this was a method of preservation ill suited to the pocket almanac. Unless one had access to uncut sheets, the leaves of these little 16mo booklets would have suited only the smallest bindings. ¶ Given title variations and the vagaries of cataloging fragmentary material, we readily admit the possibility that we missed something. That said, complete single-sheet pocket almanacs this early are rare in the trade. We find only eight in auction records (two of them offered multiple times). Most of these were significantly damaged and suffered textual loss (some of them having been recovered as binding waste). We don't pretend to be comprehensive—we expect others have changes hands over the years—but we know of JUST THREE SALES OF EARLIER SINGLE-SHEET POCKET ALMANACS IN COMPARABLE CONDITION: a 1563 Schreibkalender offered by Nina Musinsky in 2015, a 1545 Lyon Liseur ordinaire en astronomie in 2012 (€4,340), and a 1546 Antwerp almanac in 2006 ($1,200).

CONDITION: In a plain paper wrapper of the 20th century. The Almanach printed in red and black throughout, with a woodcut of the zodiac man on the title. ¶ The Prognosticon lacking three leaves (B5, B12, and B16). A few leaves of the Almanach are trimmed close at the top, and a tiny speck of ink made us wonder if we might be missing a line at the top of A15r. We instead suspect it's just a bit of errant ink from the upper shoulder of that piece of type (the inadvertent inking of shoulders was among the most common blemishes in hand-press printing); there's too much white space above the left half of that line, where we should expect to find some descenders, and the top line of the verso has plenty of room above it. First and last leaves soiled and dusty, otherwise just scattered light soiling throughout; edges of first and last couple of leaves a little ragged, the title the worst, and with the imprint partially rubbed off.

REFERENCES: Not in VD16 or USTC ¶ "Mithobius d. Ä., Hector," Biobibliographisches Handbuch der Kalendermacher von 1550 bis 1750 (online); Andrew Pettegree, “Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print: Typology and Typography,” Broadsheets (Brill, 2017), p. 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"), 29 (medical and agricultural topics were most common in early almanacs); 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"); Catarina Zimmermann-Homeyer, "Illustrated Almanacs: Imaging Strategies on Bloodletting Calendars of the Incunabula Period," Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (2022), p. 119 (“The authors of the almanacs were therefore physicians, astronomers and mathematicians," given the centrality of astrological calculations to rendering medical advice); James Raven and Goran Proot, "Renaissance and Reformation," The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford Univ, 2020), p. 162 (“The small books that most people encountered were probably almanacs and prayer books"); Matthew J. Shaw, "Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin: Almanacs and the Atlantic World," Printing History New Series 2 (July 2007), p. 24 (“Almanacs typically mixed the complex with the commonplace, creating a dense cultural resource,” speaking of colonial American almanacs, but no less true for many others)

Item #729