Tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day

Tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day
Tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day

Video: Tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day

Video: Tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day
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In ancient Rome, the first days of each month were called Kalends. These days debtors went to creditors to pay monthly interest. What they wrote about in books called calendars. So initially they had nothing to do with the calculation of days. And even more so, they did not carry out any educational function. In Russia, for a long time, they used the month-word - in fact, the church calendar, in which, in addition to the days of remembrance of saints and the circle of church holidays, in fact, there was nothing.

Tear-off calendars
Tear-off calendars

Like many things in Russia, the mass annual calendar appeared thanks to Peter I. First published in 1708, it was also called the calendar, but, in fact, it was already a civil, not an Orthodox calendar. He subsequently acquired many modern features thanks to an associate of Peter I, Yakov Bruce. The Bryusov calendar told about eclipses of the Sun and Moon, the timing of agricultural work, weather and illnesses, and contained a lot of useful information at that time.

But, alas, this distant ancestor, who has a modern tear-off calendar in his relatives, did not become closer to the people. In 1727, the exclusive right to publish it was taken over byMetropolitan (St. Petersburg) Academy of Sciences. Calendars were published in small editions, each of which was intended for a certain class in content, and not everyone could afford it. By that time, the monopoly on the publication of calendars had ended, and Sytin immediately jumped at the brilliant idea. The "General Calendar", presented by him at the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition in 1884, made a splash. In fact, every Russian family could buy a universal reference manual for all occasions at an affordable price.

Listening to the comments and advice of Leo Tolstoy, Sytin made many corrections to his calendar, the direct heirs of which are all modern tear-off calendars. The subsequent success of the publication was overwhelming. From 1885 to 1916 in the Russian Empire, where only a third of the population was considered literate, the circulation of the calendar grew from 6 to 21 million copies. This edition was truly popular: it was carefully kept on a par with the Bible, people learned to read from it.

Tear-off calendar
Tear-off calendar

Under the Soviet regime, the tear-off calendar retained its informational and educational function, however, due to mass popularity and multimillion circulation, its contents were carefully controlled by the authorities responsible for ideology. Like so many other high-demand items, the humble tear-off calendar has been in short supply. Mute but weighty evidence of its popularity are the thick generic notebooksin which our grandparents, mothers and fathers annually pasted clippings from torn-off pages-days: useful tips and recipes, patterns and knitting patterns, children's poems and fairy tales.

tear-off calendar
tear-off calendar

…The 21st century has come, where one click of a mobile phone button or two clicks of a computer mouse is enough to call up the calendar. Do you think the tear-off calendar is no longer popular? No matter how! It's still in production and the variety is amazing: for housewives and anglers, for fitness and dieters, medical, astrological, gardening, erotic…There are even special programs for smartphones, scrupulously, with all the inherent details recreating the look that the tear-off calendar had in the days when it was read avidly on one-sixth of the land!

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