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The Collation

'Tis the season for almanacs

December crocodile

December crocodile

As our two commenters on the last post sussed out, this month’s crocodile mystery is a detail from an almanac, the black “Swallow” overprinting the red “Dove” the names of authors of two different almanacs. Below is the full title page of the work in question, Swallow 1633. An Almanack for the yeare since the nativity of our Saviour MDCXXXIII Being the first after Bissextile or Leap-yeare, and from our Saviour’s passion 1600. Calculated properly for the famous Universitie and Town of Cambridge, where the pole is elevated above the Horizon 52 degrees and 17 minut.

title page of Swallow 1633

title page of Swallow 1633

  1. This almanac obviously hasn’t been written in, but other almanac owners did use theirs that way. Adam Smyth’s Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge 2010) has a chapter on almanacs as an instance of life-writing.
  2. If you follow the links to the ESTC records for the individual almanacs, you can finding holding information; note, however, that the identification of it being in a private collection refers to copies that are now in the Folger’s sammelband.
  3. This brief account of Potter’s life has been drawn from H. R. Woudhuysen’s “Writing Tables and Table Books” Electronic British Library Journal 2004, article 3, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2004articles/pdf/article3.pdf.
  4. Bernard Capp, “The Potter Almanacs” Electronic British Library Journal 2004, article 4, http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2004articles/pdf/article4.pdf; Capp, Astrology and the popular press: English almanacs, 1500-1800 (London: Faber, 1979); Lauren Kassell,  “Almanacs and Prognostications” in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume One: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/people/kassell/2011.pdf. The standard biographical survey of almanacs up to 1600 is Eustace F. Bousanquet’s English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications: A Bibliograpnical History to the Year 1600 (London: Bibiographical Society, 1917), a copy of which can be found on the Internet Archive.

Comments

By the way, if you want to take a gander at a 1565 almanac (the calendar only, without the prognostication), we have one in our digital image collection: http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/t1018c

Sarah Werner — December 12, 2013

Reply

Noticed some bracketed question marks in the caption to the inscription: I think the guy’s name is actually Edward Masewell (he ran out of room). And the whole thing sounds like part of the beginning of some sort of agreement, so “of the one P[ar]ty” (the “e” in “one” is a two stroke e). There is an “&” after the last name, indicating that the writer was planning to include additional other “parties” to the agreement. It is not unusual to see these sorts of draft excerpts from common types of legal documents on endleaves.

Heather Wolfe — December 13, 2013

Reply

Thanks, Heather–I took the transcription from the catalog record, so I’ll let Deborah know about your comment!

Sarah Werner — December 13, 2013

Reply

There has been a mistranscription of the name of the previous owner which reads Edward Maxwell not Edward Mason. The unknown/uncertain words would seem to me to probably be ‘enc[lose]d p[roper]ty’ but I would be less certain of this.
Regards
Cliff Webb

Cliff Webb — January 17, 2014

Reply

Yes, Maxwell seems more probable than Masewell (see my 13 December comment)! Thanks for your suggestion.

Heather Wolfe — January 31, 2014

Reply

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