1674: Notes

The almanac as notation booklets

Appointments, purchases, bookkeeping, recipes, drawings, penmanship exercises - all of these can be found in almanacs. Just as we fill our appointment diaries with our own scribblings, so our ancestors recorded their daily concerns in almanacs. And for modern researchers this is one of their most engaging aspects. Almanacs allow us to look, quite literally, into the kitchen of their previous owners. More than any other book, the almanac was meant to write in. Notation almanacs, for example, contain a calendar with extra white space for notes. The memory almanacs were also made for notations and are comparable to our birthday calendars. These are usually to be found in the back of ordinary almanacs. Almanacs were also often 'interleaved': blank sheets were folded in between the printed pages in the binding process so that more notations could be made.

Booksellers

Eager use was made of these sheets in professional circles, as can be seen from the many annotated 'comptoir almanacs' in the KB collection. A series of such almanacs from the Amsterdam booksellers' guild, for instance, contains extensive notations regarding book sales and impending appointments of various booksellers.

Individual owners

The striking thing about the notations made by individual almanac owners is that they usually do not appear systematically throughout the entire year. Many notations seem to have been recorded accidentally or haphazardly, because someone needed a blank piece of paper, for instance. A direct relationship to the calendar is not always evident. Quite a few almanacs also contain notations and drawings that were made years after the almanac was issued.

Use of the almanac over multiple years

In the almanac shown here, notations were made for February 1671 by the wineseller Isaak Pool in March 1674. Contrary to what you would expect, the utility value of an almanac was sometimes longer than one year.

Anonymity

One problem in interpreting the notations in almanacs is that the name or profession of the owner is often missing. Sometimes a name can be found on an endpaper, but this is rare. Also to be found are the occasional incidental remarks such as the name of the person who gave the almanac as a gift, or a rhyme such as: 'Die dit boekje komt te steelen is een dief / En die het my wederom geeft is my lief' (Whoever steals this book is a thief / And whoever returns it to me earns my regard) (De nieuwe vermaakelyke gogeltas of almanach voor 1763) [The New Entertaining Bag of Tricks, or Almanac, for 1763]).

Ex libris

You do find many almanacs in the KB collection with the ex-libris of later owners. A few hundred of the KB almanacs contain the ex-libris of the lawyer F.G. Waller, a private collector of almanacs and other popular printed works. The KB also has several almanacs in its collection that were once the property of famous Dutch people such as members of the house of Orange-Nassau, Constantijn Huygens, the publisher J.W. Enschedé and the poet Willem Kloos.