1895: Students

Almanacs and education

The almanac's calendar section lent itself to the practice of recording engagements and daily annotations. Today, the appointment diary has taken over this role. If there is one environment that is inextricably bound up with the appointment diary (at least in the Netherlands), it's the classroom. Oddly enough, it wasn't until the beginning of the nineteenth century that such a connection came to exist between education and almanacs. But this connection quickly proved so durable, especially in the universities, that it has continued up to the present day.

Development of the students' almanacs

The first Dutch students' almanacs were published in around 1815 in Leiden, Utrecht and Groningen. They contained information about the coming academic year, provided lists of the university's professors and students, and included stories and poems for and about students. They look like the business almanacs that were being made for certain professional groups. After the students themselves took up the task of making their own almanacs, the books began flourishing. More and more students' corps produced their own almanacs. They may have been a late discovery as a distinct target group, but students emerged as the most creative almanac makers of all time. It became a golden rule, especially in the twentieth century, that each almanac had to be different from the one before it. Many a gifted writer or artist from the halls of academia saw the almanac as a place to spread his or her wings. The size of the books expanded, and apparently neither trouble nor money was spared in their production. Thus student almanacs found themselves serving a function that was entirely different from that of a practical yearbook, which explains why they are still being published today, unlike so many other almanacs.

Source for research

Because the student almanac survived the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers us a splendid angle for research. Naturally it is unsurpassed as a source of insight into the development of student humour. But because student almanacs have been so varied in their appearance, they also serve as a highly suitable phenomenon for following the development of book production. Each almanac had to open with a portrait of the king or queen, the rector or a professor, and those who take the trouble to study them chronologically will witness an entire evolution of illustration techniques. Typographical trends and binding methods are also easy to discover. The modern student almanac has little in common with sixteenth-century astrological almanacs, but the fact that both books bear the same name demonstrates the power of the concept of a little book that offers a colourful variety of text and tips and has to be replaced after the year is over.