This kind of almanac merges the Gregorian and lunar calendars, Chinese astrology, agricultural timings, and folk beliefs into a book of seasonal cycles, daily recommendations, and astrological predictions. There’s no one true form—hundreds of variations exist.

not a techno-determinist account where abstract mechanical forces drive change, not a chronology of inventions, but a narrative teeming with lives, and a history that is full of contingencies and quirks, the successes and failures, the routes forward and the paths not taken, of these eighteen book-makers. People make books, and this is a history of the ways they have done so.

Robin’s 2025 gift guide

Many mornings this season, I’d wake before 4 a.m., and a train would be blowing its horn through the dark valley. Kathryn and I would start our day, start our mill. This year, hearing me describe the work, my sister declared that I had found my way, at last, into a Richard Scarry scene.

I’ll confess again: I am merely bourgeois. I like buying and selling; I like making and marketing. I like animals wearing pants, carrying bread in the street. I think it’s just great—the dance of it all.