Its publication has been continued under the title of Old Moore’s Almanac. Of a different but not a better sort was Poor Robin, dating from 1663, and published by the company down to 1828, which abounded in coarse, sometimes extremely coarse, humour.
The exclusive right to sell “almanacs and prognostications” in England, enjoyed in the time of Elizabeth by two members of the Company of Stationers, was extended by James I. to the two universities and the Stationers’ Company jointly; but the universities commuted their privilege for an annuity from the company. This monopoly was challenged by Thomas Carnan, a bookseller, who published an almanac for three successive years, after having been thrice imprisoned on that account by the company. The case came, in 1775, before the court of common pleas, and was decided in Carnan’s favour, the question argued being, “Whether almanacs were such public ordinances, such matters of state, as belonged to the king by his prerogative, so as to enable him to communicate an exclusive right of printing them to a grantee of the crown?” In 1779 Lord North attempted to reverse this decision by a parliamentary enactment, but the bill was thrown out. In consequence of this the universities lost their title to their annuity, and in lieu of it they received a parliamentary grant. The company, however, virtually retained its monopoly for many years, by buying up as much as possible all the almanacs issued by other publishers, but in more recent times this power has altogether ceased, although a considerable proportion of the almanacs published in England still issue from the hall of the Stationers’ Company. A description of “Almanac Day” at Stationers’ Hall will be found in Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London (1851), p. 588.
On the 1st of January 1828 the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge issued the British Almanac for that year—a publication greatly superior in every way to the almanacs of the time. The success of the British Almanac, with its valuable supplement, the Companion to the Almanac, led to a great improvement in this class of publications. The Stationers' Company issued the Englishman’s Almanac, a work of a similar kind. The entire repeal in 1834, by the 3rd and 4th Will.IV. c.57, of the heavy stamp duty, first imposed in 1710, on all almanacs of fifteenpence per copy, gave an additional stimulus to the publication of almanacs of a better class, and from that time the number has greatly increased. Since 1870, the British Almanac and Companion have been the principal almanacs published by the Stationers' Company. Whitaker’s Almanac, commenced in 1868 by Joseph Whitaker (1820–1895), is perhaps the best known of modern almanacs.
In Scotland, almanacs containing much astrological matter appeared to have been published at about the beginning of the 16th century; and about a century later those published at Aberdeen enjoyed considerable reputation. In 1683, the Edinburgh’s True Almanack, or a New Prognostication, appeared; a publication which improved with years and was issued after 1837 as Oliver and Boyd’s New Edinburgh Almanac, a standard book of reference for Scottish affairs. Thom’s Irish Almanac (since 1843) deals mainly with Ireland.
The earliest almanac published in the United States is probably to be ascribed to Bradford’s press in Philadelphia, for the year 1687. Poor Richard’s Almanac, commenced in 1732 by Benjamin Franklin under the pseudonym of “Richard Saunders,” and continued by him for twenty-five years, gained a high reputation for its wise and witty sayings; it may have been suggested by a somewhat similar publication by Thomas, of Dedham, Massachusetts. The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge was published at Boston from 1828 to 1861; a continuation, The National Almanac, was published only twice, for 1863 and 1864. The Old Farmer’s Almanac enjoys considerable popularity and has been published for many years. At the present time nearly every religious denomination, trade and newspaper have almanacs or year-books.
In France prophetic almanacs circulated very freely among the poorer and rural classes, although an ordonnance of Charles IX. required the seal of a diocesan bishop on all almanacs. In 1579 Henry III. prohibited the publication of predictions relating to political events, a prohibition renewed by Louis XIII. Of such almanacs, the most famous was the Almanack Liégeois first published in 1625 at Liége by Matthieu Laensbergh, a person of very problematic existence. Publications of this class subsequently increased in number to such an extent that, in 1852, their circulation was forcibly checked by the government. The most important French almanac is the Almanach Royal, afterwards Impérial, and now National, first published in 1679.
A number of publications, issued in Germany, from the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 19th century, under such titles as Musenalmanach, modelled on the Almanach des Muses, a contemporary almanac published at Paris, contain some of the best works of some of the most celebrated German poets. The Almanach de Gotha, which has existed since 1763, published since 1871 both in French and German, gives a particular account of all the royal and princely families of Europe, and ample details concerning the administration and the statistics of the different states of the world.
For the Nautical Almanac and similar publications, see Ephemeris.
ALMANDINE, or Almandite, a name applied to certain
kinds of precious garnet, being apparently a corruption of
alabandicus, which is the name applied by Pliny to a stone found
or worked at Alabanda, a town in Caria in Asia Minor. Almandine
is an iron alumina garnet, of deep red colour inclining to purple.
It is frequently cut with a convex face, or en cabochon, and is
then known as carbuncle. Viewed through the spectroscope
in a strong light, it generally shows three characteristic absorption
bands, as first pointed out by Prof. A. H. Church.
Almandine occurs rather abundantly in the gem-gravels of Ceylon, whence it has sometimes been called Ceylon-ruby. When the colour inclines to a violet tint, the stone is often called Syrian garnet, a name said to be taken from Syriam, an ancient town of Pegu. Large deposits of fine almandine-garnets were found, some years ago, in the Northern Territory of South Australia, and were at first taken for rubies, whence they were known in trade for some time afterwards as Australian rubies.
Almandine is widely distributed. Fine rhombic dodecahedra occur in the schistose rocks of the Zillerthal, in Tyrol, and are sometimes cut and polished. An almandine in which the ferrous oxide is replaced partly by magnesia is found at Luisenfeld in German East Africa. In the United States there are many localities which yield almandine. Dr G. F. Kunz has figured a crystal of coarse almandine weighing 923 ℔. from New York city. Fine crystals of almandine embedded in mica-schist occur near Fort Wrangell in Alaska. The coarse varieties of almandine are often crushed for use as an abrasive agent. (See Garnet.)
ALMANSA, or Alamanza, a town of eastern Spain, in the
province of Albacete; 35 m. E.S.E. of Albacete, on the Madrid-Alicante
railway. Pop. (1900) 11,180. Almansa is built at the
foot of a white limestone crag, which is surmounted by a Moorish
castle, and rises abruptly in the midst of a fertile and irrigated
plain. About 1 m. S. stands an obelisk commemorating
the battle fought here on the 25th of April 1707, in which the
French under the duke of Berwick, a natural son of James II. of
Great Britain, routed the allied British, Portuguese and Spanish
troops. (See Spanish Succession, War of the.)
ALMA-TADEMA, SIR LAURENCE (Laurens) (1836–),
British artist, was born on the 8th of January 1836, at Dronrijp,
a Frisian village near Leeuwarden, the son of Pieter Tadema,
a notary, who died when he was four years old. Alma was the
name of his godfather. His mother (d. 1863) was his father’s
second wife, and was left with a large family. It was designed
that the boy should follow his father’s profession; but he had
so great a leaning towards art that he was eventually sent to
Antwerp, where in 1852 he entered the academy under Gustav
Wappers. Thence he passed to the atelier of Henri (afterwards
Baron) Leys. In 1859 he assisted Leys in the latter’s frescoes
in the hall of the hôtel de ville at Antwerp. In the exhibition
of Alma-Tadema’s collected works at the Grosvenor Gallery in
London in the winter of 1882–1883 were two pictures which may
be said to mark the beginning and end of his first period. These
were a portrait of himself, dated 1852, and “A Bargain,” painted
