Wappen-Calender auf das Jahr 1747

designed by I.N. Lentener | engraved by Michael Rössler and Andreas Reinhard the Younger

Frankfurt [1746?]

1 broadside | Full-sheet | 915 x 373 mm

A dramatic, hand-colored double-sheet broadside almanac for Frankfurt. Our edition is very similar to a series published 1743-1806, in large part by Philipp Heinrich Hutter, and later by one Jäger, though they appear to have typically included a colophon. See, for example, editions of 1761 and 1780. As was common with this style of almanac, the immense engraved border surrounds letterpress content. This would certainly have reduced the expense of engraving so much text, but also would have permitted a certain flexibility of content for publisher and owner alike. For example, we've seen letterpress calendars for subsequent years simply pasted over an earlier edition, essentially reusing the engraved border. ¶ This layout evokes for us a kind of international fusion of almanac design. It combines the massive grandeur of the French wall calendars popularized in the 17th century with the mise-en-page of the traditional German broadsheet almanac, standardized in the 16th century and characterized by numerous individual woodcuts surrounding a letterpress calendar. Our illustrations depart from the well trodden seasonal and biblical scenes, instead centering at top the black eagle of the Holy Roman Empire and the arms of Johann Cristoph von Ochsenstein, Frankurt's bürgermeister. Fully encircling the letterpress content are the arms of 46 additional nobles, with a view of Frankfurt at the very bottom. At a full three feet in length, it's an imposing wall calendar. ¶ The top sheet contains the daily calendar for the year, laid out in eight columns and providing the minimum of typical almanac data: dates, religious feasts, moon phases (represented by the usual red and black circles and crescents), and moon signs (represented by little zodiac ornaments). The lower sheet lists Frankfurt's many city officials. The closer you get to the bottom, the more interesting it becomes, where we find representatives for the city's crafts and trades: bath house owners, barbers, brewers, bookbinders, diamond cutters, gold- and silver-smiths, milliners, and more. ¶ Almanacs were available in an astonishing variety of sizes and formats. We can imagine large wall versions like these hanging in affluent households, certainly, though we also heed Maxine Préaud's remarks on the massive 17th-century French wall calendars: "Almanacs are found where they are useful, which is to say, among people who work." Those in government, schoolmasters, even craftsmen, she suggests. In 16th-century Strasbourg, they were found on the wall of a mine foreman's widow, and in the office of an orphanage administrator. "They were probably in cabarets," too, Préaud continues. "Affixed to partitions [cloisons], exposed to the light, to smoke, and to cooking grease of kitchens in a dirty and dusty city, these images had a hard time reaching the end of the year in good condition. And, when their replacements came, they were thrown away, used to wrap vegetables or to light the fire." ¶ Taking their ephemeral purpose with the obvious challenge of storing such a large item in the long term, we suspect Laure Beaumont-Maillet's comment on France's 17th-century wall calendars should apply here, too: "Jeopardized [fragilisées] by their large dimensions and by their ephemeral nature, tied to the calendar they accompanied, these prints have become very rare outside of public collections." Hand-colored copies are scarcer still and represent something richer—in multiple senses of the word—than their black-and-white peers. Or to quote Susan Dackerman: “Painted prints are a hybrid art form, both printed design and painting." They bridge media and expand audiences, and that's especially remarkable for a genre as ubiquitous and quotidian as the almanac. ¶ We locate no copies of this edition (but recognize that serial records can obscure item-level information).

CONDITION: Printed in red and black on the rectos only of two sheets of watermarked laid paper, pasted together with roughly an inch of overlap. The engraved border is fully colored by hand. ¶ A bit ragged at the edges, with minimal loss affecting the outer border, occasionally grazing a bit of colored image; two or three square inches of loss in the upper left edge inexpertly restored; a handful of scattered closed tears, all repaired, the longest about 4"; scattered spots of surface skinning, mostly affecting the red paint; one hard crease across the horizontal dimension, and faint additional creases; several paper patches on the blank verso, and brown paper tape running along the entire border of the blank verso.

REFERENCES: Laure Beaumont-Maillet, [prefatory note], Les effets du soleil: almanachs du règne de Louis XIV (1995), p. 7 (cited above); Maxine Préaud, "Introduction," Effets du soleil, p. 12 (cited above); Miriam Usher Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (1982), p. 74 (for 16th-century Strasbourg use); Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (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."); Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance (Brill, 2018), p. 254 (the 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”); Horst Meyer, "Almanacks and Poltergeists: Gottfried Kisling's interleaved 'Oßnabrückscher Stiffts-Calender' (1713-1739)," The German Book 1450-1750 (1995), p. 339-340 ("The major event of the printer's year was, however, the production of the almanacks. These were traditionally published in three formats," namely a pocket Taschenkalender, a quarto Schreibkalender, and a broadside wall calendar; Schreibkalender production started in late August, and broadsides in early December.); Susan Dackerman, "Introduction," Painted Prints (2002), p. 2 (cited above; “Often the painting on the prints was not executed by the printmaker himself, but by a professional print colorist")

Item #854