It's official: the 2007 edition of The Old Farmers Almanac is now out in the stores. If your ancestors have been in the United States for a few generations, there's an excellent chance that your parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and even earlier generations read this same book. After all, it has been published every year since 1793, making it the oldest continuously published periodical in North America.
Robert B. Thomas started publishing The Farmers Almanac in 1793. George Washington was president at the time. The Almanac sold for six pence (about nine cents). The Farmers Almanac quickly became the most popular publication of its kind. Nearly forty years later, in 1832, Thomas added the word "old" to the title. He apparently had a change of heart in 1836 when he removed the word "old" from the title. The word was re-inserted a year later, after Thomas' death.
The Old Farmer's Almanac has published useful information for people in all walks of life: tide tables for those who live near the ocean; sunrise tables and planting charts for those who live on the farm; recipes for those who live in the kitchen; and forecasts for those who don't like the question of weather left up in the air.
In fact, The Old Farmers Almanac claims to be 80% accurate in its weather forecasts, most of which are written six to eighteen months before the date in question. The forecasts are based upon Robert B. Thomas' secret formula that reportedly used a complex series of natural cycles. Even today, his formula is kept safely tucked away in a black tin box at the Almanac offices in Dublin, New Hampshire. Eighty per cent accuracy sounds impressive until you also learn that random guesses about the weather tend to be about 76% accurate!
The Almanac has many tables that are 100% accurate and useful to farmers, mariners, and many others: times of sunrise, sunset, high tide, and low tide, as well as the phases of the moon and other astronomical information. In fact, during World War Two, the information was a bit too accurate. It seems that a Nazi saboteur caught on Long Island with a copy of The Old Farmers Almanac in his jacket pocket. The assumption is that the saboteur was interested in the tide tables as some ship or submarine perhaps was going to retrieve him at high tide on an appointed date. However, military intelligence suspected the enemy was using the Almanac's famously detailed weather predictions in its operations. The Almanac had to stick to very general weather material until the end of the war.
Robert B. Thomas died in 1846 at the age of 80, supposedly while reading page proofs for the 1847 edition. His publication lives on, however. The Old Farmers Almanac has had only thirteen editors in its 213 years of continuous publication.
Today, The Old Farmers Almanac has gone high tech. Yes, it has a web page and even a web cam that shows the local weather outside the Almanac's offices in Dublin, New Hampshire. I wonder what Mr. Thomas would have thought of that?
The words of the Almanac's founder, Robert B. Thomas, still guide today's staff: "Our main endeavor is to be useful, but with a pleasant degree of humor."
You can find The Old Farmers Almanac at most grocery, hardware, and book stores. Pick up a copy and see what grandpa used to read.
A somewhat different, but still very interesting, electronic version may be found at http://www.almanac.com.
