In the old days, serious secular households like mine kept Whitaker's Almanack as the standard reference book, occupying more or less the place of a Bible, alongside a dictionary and an atlas. At the end of each year, one of our Christmas presents would be the next year's edition-not the inferior paperback "Shorter Edition" nor the pretentious leather-bound "Library Edition," but the superior red-and-green hardback "Complete Edition." We would study it in turn-especially the summaries of the previous year's events-and then use it several times during the coming year for quick reference or slow re-reading. Much of my knowledge of recent history and current affairs came from studying old Whitaker's Almanacks before they were discarded. But it has been a long time since I bothered to open even a new edition.
For someone like myself to look at Whitaker's Almanack today, 130 years after its first appearance, must be a little like a Christian looking at a new Bible many years after reading the Authorised Version. To start with: it looks wrong, more like an ordinary book than an almanack (or almanac?). It is all red instead of red-and-green; the format is larger, medium instead of crown octavo; the paper is thinner; the type is lighter; the index is at the back instead of the front. It is not even really Whitaker's any more; it comes from the Stationery Office; and the Stationery Office isn't stationary, but seems to change its address every few months.
Like a new Bible, however, most of the contents in the 1277 pages are much the same as before. It has astronomical and chronological data for the coming year (with the perpetual calendar for any year), tidal tables and geographical statistics, the Royal Family and the peerage, parliament and the government (especially useful after an election), the law and the services, religion and education, welfare and utilities, local and regional affairs, economics and finance, legal notes, media and scholarship, societies and institutions, international organisations and foreign countries, events and reports of the year, literature and arts, weather and sport, weights and measures, abbreviations and index.
Two kinds of question arise. How useful is all this stuff, and how much of it is more efficiently presented and more easily obtained elsewhere? Does Whitaker's Almanack remain the standard reference book for non-specialists, or has it been superseded by more specialist publications? Almost no one looks here for anniversaries, the times of the rising and setting of the sun and moon, or of high and low tides, for details of taxation and insurance or of sports results and school fees (although I notice that the fees of my own school have leapt more than 60 times-three times faster than the cost of living-since I was there 50 years ago). If you want to watch the rise and fall of your friends and enemies in academe or politics, the media or the arts, the civil service or the armed forces, you must consult much narrower yearbooks. And one surely looks for proper lists of prime ministers and parliamentary majorities, Roman and Holy Roman Emperors, popes and Nobel prize-winners, Egyptian and Chinese dynasties, French kings, Russian tsars and so on.
More important: since Whitaker's Almanack is going to be in all libraries and many private houses, how accessible and reliable is the information in it? The bias towards the establishment (in every sense) involves the omission of smaller social, political or sexual organisations, but this is to be expected. Virtually all factual information is clearly presented and apparently accurate, but much of the commentary is both clumsily written and evidently wrong. Thus the section on the year's literature is inappropriately verbose and platitudinous, and the section on religion is appropriately distorted by improbable claims. Sections on the cultures of foreign countries are insufficient and inconsistent. And, predictably, there are a few misprints ("Ghandi," for example, and "Gettysberg"). Ironically, while Whitaker's Almanack has a page about the internet, it doesn't have a home page on the internet.
The best things in reference books (as in newspapers and magazines) are the little bits at the bottoms of pages; but instead of odd pieces of miscellaneous information Whitaker's Almanack now has white gaps, sometimes leaving more than half a page empty. For the next edition, a good filler editor should be employed to provide the useless items which have proved the most interesting reading for its users.
Whitaker's Almanack 1998
Hilary Marsden (editor)
Stationery Office, ?35
