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Author Bowen, Nathan, 1698-1776
Title The New-England diary, or Almanack for the year of our Lord 1725. ... [electronic resource] / By a native of New England
Imprint Boston: : Printed and sold by J. Franklin, at his shop in Union-Street, near the Green Dragon, where may be had the same almanack printed on a broad-side., 1725 [i.e., 1724]
Descript [16] p. ; 15 cm. (8vo)
Series Early American imprints. First series ; no. 39821
Note At head of title: MDCCXXV
Two versions of this almanac were issued over the same pen-name and thus allegedly by the same author, the other being printed at Boston by B. Green. Franklin's edition, unlike Green's, is not signed by Bowen, and is said to be a pirated almanac. Cf. Nichols, Charles L. "Notes on the almanacs of Massachusetts." Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc., n.s. 22 (1912): 54. The calculations on the calendar pages of the two issues are basically identical. The notes on the calendar pages largely differ, particularly in that the Franklin issue omits the abundant planetary and zodiacal information found in the issue by Green, and includes church days, which Green's edition lacks. The respective eclipse notes are versions of each other
Green's version includes also several pages of astronomical matter, animadversions on the almanac author Nathaniel Whittemore, and a table of roads. None of these appears in the Franklin edition, which contains instead two pages entitled "The principal holy-days in the year explain'd."
Later almanac authors occasionally issued similarly varying editions by different publishers, and possibly the two present versions are legitimate and intended for different audiences
The calendar pages of the Franklin edition contain many of those enigmatic and oracular observations, seemingly apropos of nothing, which characterize Bowen's almanacs and are not readily imitated. Only one of these ("The winner is a loser", at June 12) occurs in both almanacs, but the examples in the Franklin edition have Bowen's flavor. Still it is possible that they were imitated specifically to give that authentic flavor, and that this is why there are so many of them in the Franklin issue. On the other hand, their abundance may have been intended by Bowen to compensate for the paucity of astronomical notes on the calendar pages of this issue
Advertised in the New-England courant, Boston, Nov. 16/23, 1724
Bristol B700
Shipton & Mooney 39821
Drake, M. Almanacs, 3012
Microform version available in the Readex Early American Imprints series
Electronic text and image data. [Chester, Vt. : Readex, a division of Newsbank, Inc., 2002-2004. Includes files in TIFF, GIF and PDF formats with inclusion of keyword searchable text. (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 39821)
Subject Whittemore, Nathaniel, 1673-1754
Almanacs -- Massachusetts -- 1725. rbgenr
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