Black leather spine with red title plate and gilt banding and lettering. Black cloth boards.

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                      A collection of early Yorkshire Almanacs neatly bound

John Hartley, born in 1839 in Halifax, was a prolific author of stories and poems in Yorkshire dialect.  His work is funny, sardonic, exuberant, often sentimental, often grotesque, realistic about the tough lives of West Riding people.  He often shared and exaggerated events in his own life through his alter ego, Sammywell (Samuel) Grimes, and Sammywell’s sharp-tongued wife, Mally (based on Hartley’s second wife Sophia Ann).  Sammywell’s comic misadventures, like his creator’s, took him to America, London, Blackpool, Paris and the Lakes.

The Clock Almanack is probably Hartley’s best known work.  He edited it from the 1860s with gaps for travel until his death in 1915, though the title continued to be published until the 1950s.  In a tiny type of poor quality paper, produced in great numbers (80,000 sold per year at its peak), this title was part of a unique cultural phenomenon: the explosion of dialect almanacs aimed at the vast new reading public among the working people of the West Riding.

Interested in Yorkshire dialect?  Special Collections is rich in Yorkshire dialect works: the Waddington-Feather book collection includes copies of the Almanack and several other works by John Hartley, and there is also plenty in the Mitchell, Priestley and Riley book collections.   Several works by Hartley are online at Project Gutenberg.

An almanac (also spelled almanack and almanach) is a regularly published listing of a set of current information about one or multiple subjects. It includes information like weather forecasts, farmers’ planting dates, tide tables, and other tabular data often arranged according to the calendar. Celestial figures and various statistics are found in almanacs, such as the rising and setting times of the Sun and Moon, dates of eclipses, hours of high and low tides, and religious festivals. The set of events noted in an almanac may be tailored for a specific group of readers, such as farmers, sailors, or astronomers.