What was advertised in a colonial American newspaper 250 years ago today?

“THE LANCASTER ALMANACK, for the year 1775.”

It was a sign of the changing seasons.  As the summer of 1774 came to a close, the first advertisements for almanacs for 1775 began to appear in newspapers, part of an annual ritual.  Each year printers deployed advertisements in weekly periodicals to hawk their annual periodicals.  Francis Bailey, a printer in Lancaster, was among the first to do so in 1774, placing notices in the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Journal on September 21.  Readers still had more than three months to acquire their almanacs before the new year, yet each year many printers saw opportunities to increase sales and beat their competitors by making the useful and entertaining pamphlets available in the late summer and early fall.  That also allowed plenty of time for shopkeepers to purchase in volume, often receiving a discount, to stock and sell to their own customers.

For his part, Bailey relied on the contents of the “LANCASTER ALMANACK, for the year 1775” in generating the copy for his advertisement, adopting a common practice among printers of almanacs.  It was his first endeavor in printing and marketing an almanac, having opened a printing office Lancaster in 1771 and initially focusing on job printing.  Bailey realized that printing an almanac of his own could be a lucrative venture, supplementing the other sources of revenue in his printing office.  Some of the contents he could compile on his own, such as the essays and poetry, but he needed a mathematician or astronomer to supply the astronomical calculations, including “the motions of the sun and moon; the true places and aspects of the planets; the rising and setting of the sun; [and] the rising, setting and southing of the moon.”  The title page listed Anthony Sharp as the author of those astronomical calculations, though, as was the case with many other almanacs, the author was a pseudonym.  According to the entry in the American Antiquarian Society’s catalog, Anthony Sharp was “a pseudonym found only in the almanacs published by Bailey.”  Furthermore, the “calculations throughout duplicate those in Father Abraham’s almanack for 1775 (Philadelphia) whose title page states that it is [David] Rittenhouse’s work.”

Each year colonizers in and near Lancaster had ready access to various almanacs published by the several printers in Philadelphia, yet Bailey recognized his chance to give them an option for a local edition.  He established a relationship with a noted astronomer to provide the tables, then advertised his Lancaster Almanack before the Philadelphia editions went to press.  The success of his venture depended in part on making his new almanac available to local customers before they had an option to purchase any of the alternatives that would come off the presses in Philadelphia.