Word: almanacks
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...interests of a man who tried to take all knowledge for his province, and sometimes all provinces (especially Pennsylvania) for his knowledge. The volume covers the 5½ years between 1745 and mid-17 50, and proceeds by remorseless chronology from the 13th edition of Poor Richard's Almanack (next to the Bible, the bestseller of the day) until a year or so before Franklin got to fly that famous kite in the thunderstorm. Those who like to smile with superior historical hindsight can do so on page 374 with the realization that Franklin was getting warm on lightning...
Navymen around the world await the annual edition of Jane's Fighting Ships as eagerly as European aristocrats used to await the Almanack de Gotha. Since 1897, Jane's, published in London close to the British Admiralty, has been the unofficial but authoritative best word on the relative strength and precedence of all the navies of the world...
...first of two projected volumes, Proust: The Early Years is an amazing performance, though few except cultists will regard it as readable. Author Painter has picked up every aristocratic name that the snobbish Proust dropped, and whole pages read like excerpts from the Almanack de Gotha. Relatively free of footnotes, the book is really one gigantic footnote to Proust's masterpiece. When he is not playing the elaborate chess game of fact v. fiction, Author Painter does communicate his passionate curiosity about Proust, and he draws a lively portrait of the sick, sick, sick French society that molded...
Christmas Every Day. Elsa entertained kings and queens, broke bread with half the British Cabinet, got on first-name terms with most of the Almanack de Gotha. But she refused to meet Mussolini, and her telegraphed reply to an invitation to dine with Farouk I of Egypt went straight to the point: "I do not associate with clowns, monkeys or corrupt gangsters." Every now and then the plain, plump little girl from Keokuk speaks up: "I like pretty girls, too, at parties; they're cheaper and more decorative than flowers." Elsa insists that all her partying was done just...
...more important than Who's Who in the eyes of many blue-blood Britons is the deeper question : Who was who? For years, the responsibility of cataloguing the ancestors of noble families in Europe and Great Britain was shared by Saxony's famed Almanack de Gotha and Britain's Burke's Peerage.* Of the two, the Almanack was the older and more conscientious, but in 1946, the unfeeling Red army marched into Saxony and put it out of business for good, though carefully carting its presses and files off to Moscow. The burden of keeping Britain...