This pocket-sized almanac, preserved in its original blind-stamped binding, may constitute one of the earliest surviving exemplars of its kind. Although the print genre of the schreib kalendar probably emerged sometime during the 1540s, few of the earliest examples have been preserved.

The schreib kalendar was an almanac designed for personal use with blank spaces to be written in corresponding to a given day of the year. The author of this copy, Burckhard Mithoff, taught medicine and astronomy in Marburg and served as physician to several pro-Reformist aristocrats and their families, including Landgrave Philip I (the Magnanimous) of Hesse, Erich I of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and the latter’s widow and son. Mithoff published several mainly short works of popular medicine and science, including tracts on the plague and other diseases, and a printed description of an instrument specially designed to measure solid bodies.

Like so many almanacs, this one is printed in alternating red-and-black ink. It opens with a key to an elaborate sequence of astrological symbols that later reappear printed next to particular dates to which they would be relevant throughout the year (e.g., new moon, full moon, etc.). The volume then moves on to the calendar proper, which dedicates four pages to each month. All the days of each month appear in letterpress on the left-hand side of a given opening and include the relevant astrological information, the names of specific saints’ days, and so on. Each of these printed calendar pages faces a corresponding page of blank ruled spaces on the right-hand side of the same opening, leaving the owner with space to record brief notes and observations. Though such notes as these could simply denote mundane “notes to self” such as bills to pay or appointments to keep, among the more common interventions are notes on the most auspicious dates in a given month for bloodletting, calculations most often based on particular astrological aspects and heavenly conjunctions.

In the Hopkins schreib kalendar, there are numerous manuscript notes scribbled across several pages, in some cases with further bespoke lines drawn to connect them more precisely to their appropriate day of the month. Following the calendar proper, the reader is provided with a series of predictions for the subsequent year’s crops, illnesses, weather disturbances, wars, and eclipses, illustrated in an allegorical woodcut—the book’s sole image—which includes an accurate prediction of the eclipse of June 20, 1563.

More than likely this ephemeral calendar survived thanks to its preservation inside a fine contemporary German blind-tooled binding featuring an arabesque and lozenge design impressed from a single block. One rarely encounters such luxurious and expensive bindings on inherently time-bound and ephemeral cheap imprints such as this, suggesting that this schreib kalendar might have been purchased by a particularly wealthy owner, and perhaps as something of a vade mecum fashion accessory.

In January 2021, the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Council) announced a major new grant to support the development of a database and digitization of a portion of the approximately 5,900 exemplars of the schreib kalendar known to have survived between ca. 1540 and 1800.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens