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New-England diary, or Almanack for the year of our Lord 1725
Two versions of this almanac were issued over the same pen-name and thus allegedly by the same author, the other being printed at Boston by B. Green. Franklin's edition, unlike Green's, is not signed by Bowen, and is said to be a pirated almanac. Cf. Nichols, Charles L. "Notes on the almanacs of Massachusetts." Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc., n.s. 22 (1912): 54. The calculations on the calendar pages of the two issues are basically identical. The notes on the calendar pages largely differ, particularly in that the Franklin issue omits the abundant planetary and zodiacal information found in the issue by Green, and includes church days, which Green's edition lacks. The respective eclipse notes are versions of each other.
Green's version includes also several pages of astronomical matter, animadversions on the almanac author Nathaniel Whittemore, and a table of roads. None of these appears in the Franklin edition, which contains instead two pages entitled "The principal holy-days in the year explain'd."
Later almanac authors occasionally issued similarly varying editions by different publishers, and possibly the two present versions are legitimate and intended for different audiences.
The calendar pages of the Franklin edition contain many of those enigmatic and oracular observations, seemingly apropos of nothing, which characterize Bowen's almanacs and are not readily imitated. Only one of these ("The winner is a loser", at June 12) occurs in both almanacs, but the examples in the Franklin edition have Bowen's flavor. Still it is possible that they were imitated specifically to give that authentic flavor, and that this is why there are so many of them in the Franklin issue. On the other hand, their abundance may have been intended by Bowen to compensate for the paucity of astronomical notes on the calendar pages of this issue.
Advertised in the New-England courant, Boston, Nov. 16/23, 1724.
Microform version available in the Readex Early American Imprints series.
Electronic text and image data. [Chester, Vt. : Readex, a division of Newsbank, Inc., 2002-2004. Includes files in TIFF, GIF and PDF formats with inclusion of keyword searchable text. (Early American imprints. First series ; no. 39821).