This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. Continuing our series  of highlights from the American Almanac Collection, another almanac of note is the Farmer’s Allminax by Josh Billings. Josh Billings was the pen name of humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (1818-1885). Shaw was a member of a prominent New England family—his father was a member of Congress,…

Written by Geraldine Granahan, CLIR project cataloger The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of The New-York Historical Society has several items in its collections that were printed in the Cherokee language. One example is the above almanac, Cherokee Almanac 1861, which is written in Cherokee (or Tsalagi), an Iroquoian language used by the Cherokee people. The…

This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society has a number of almanacs that were printed as advertisements by patent medicine companies.  Most people in the nineteenth century bought an almanac every year and considered them trustworthy sources of information.  Unscrupulous patent medicine manufacturers capitalized…

This post was written by cataloger Catherine Falzone. As my colleagues and I work to catalog the thousands of almanacs held by N-YHS, thanks to a Hidden Collections Program grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), we have come across some unusual items that bear a closer look. Some of my favorite…