Old farmers calendar

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Title page of the farmers' calendar from 1847
Peasant calendar from 1847: the month "July"
Up to and including 1948 it was then called the New Farmer's Calendar
Since 1949 it has been called the Old Farmer's Calendar

Old farmer's calendar , colloquially " Mandlkalender " after the small images of saints (Styrian " Mandl " for males) has been the name of a traditional farmer's calendar since 1949 , which has been printed in Graz since the early 18th century . From (presumably) 1892 to 1948 it was called " New Farmers Calendar ", before that it was simply called " Farmers Calendar ". Since it was originally intended for the simple rural population who did not know how to read, it is richly illustrated and shows, in addition to the saints of the day, symbols for the expected weather , which was predicted from past weather observations and from peasant rules, as well as for work in agriculture such as sowing, mowing, harvesting, harvesting or slaughtering and the length of day, sunrise and sunset. This calendar has been published in almost unchanged size (8.3 × 10.3 cm, 32 pages), shape and design for around 300 years, making it the oldest continuously published annual calendar worldwide.

history

The Mandlkalender developed from old calendar forms like stick calendars and wooden calendars . Forerunners can be found in the Admonter Bauernkalender (around 1500) and the Augsburg calendar. In Augsburg, the Labhart family received the imperial privilege for sales in the imperial hereditary lands on September 23, 1689. With the advent of book printing, peasant calendars became increasingly popular. In 1706, the Graz bookbinder and publisher Franz Jakob Ludwig applied to Emperor Joseph I to grant an imperial privilege to distribute such a calendar in Styria , which was also granted on December 15, 1706. The oldest surviving Mandl calendar dates from 1757. In 1785, Andreas Leykam was first mentioned as a printer . In the Styrian Archives complete rows are kept since 1784th In 1988 the calendar was checked by the Leykam-Alpina publishing house and some improvements and adjustments were made. However, it still appears in the traditional design, size, page range and in Fraktur font.
The term “new” peasant calendar refers to the Gregorian calendar reform and identifies this peasant calendar as corresponding to the Gregorian reform. From 1949 this designation was changed to “old” peasant calendar, since only Gregorian calendars have now been used in the area where the peasant calendar is used and the traditional design should now be emphasized with “old”.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the circulation was 300,000, of which around 50,000 were exported. It is assumed that around every second Styrian household bought a Mandl calendar annually at this time.

variants

Wall and book calendars from the same publisher are now also available with the same symbolism but different presentation.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Jasser: Up from the Dachstein. The Styria Breviary. Paul Neff Verlag, Vienna, 1990 ISBN 3701401314 pp. 140f.

literature

  • Sepp Walter: The Styrian Mandl Calendar - Its signs and symbols; 2nd edition, Graz 1988; 3rd edition Graz 1992. Leykam-Alpina. (Further literature on page 96). ISBN 3-7011-7905-0
  • Leopold Bein: History of the Styrian Mandl Calendar. In: Sheets on the history and local history of the Alpine countries (supplement to the Grazer Tagblatt), October 22, 1911 to May 19, 1912.
  • NN: Old farmer's calendar for day reservations 1993; Leykam-Alpina, Graz

Web links