ABSTRACT
In 1596, Thomas Nashe wrote that selling almanacs was ‘readier money than ale and cakes’. 1 Almanacs in England flourished from the 1550s until about 1700, although they also had quieter lives before and after these dates. 2 The market was crowded, frantic and profitable: almanacs constituted a lucrative and vigorously defended monopoly for the Stationers’ Company. These texts sold in numbers so large they scarcely seem credible: ‘in the sixteenth century, hundreds of thousands were printed; in the seventeenth century several millions.’ 3 Many almanacs were updated and reprinted for many years: the almanac initially printed by John Dade in 1589 continued to be revised annually until the eighteenth century. Indeed, almanacs at times acquired a kind of cultural invisibility in the seventeenth century due to their sheer ever-presentness; the ways readers responded to these texts were often similarly naturalized.
