The World Almanac and Book of Facts

 By Bruce Shawkey

One of the reference books I always kept on my shelf was the World Almanac. Turns out it has had a long and interesting history, as detailed in this wiki entry.

The first edition of The World Almanac was published by the New York World newspaper in 1868 (the name of the publication comes from the newspaper itself, which was known as the World). Published three years after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, its 120 pages of information touched on such events as the process of Reconstruction and the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.

Publication was suspended in 1876, but in 1886, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who had purchased the World and quickly transformed it into one of the most influential newspapers in the country, revived The World Almanac with the intention of making it "a compendium of universal knowledge." The World Almanac has been published annually since.

During World War II, The World Almanac could boast that it was read by GIs all over the world: between 1944 and 1946, at the request of the U.S. Government, The World Almanac had special print runs of 100,000 to 150,000 copies for distribution to the armed forces.

I found several copies from different years on the Internet Archive, but here are several images from the 1937 edition:






































 




You could even buy a functional pistol for $13.95. There were 1,032 pages in this edition. There were many ads, but also much useful information once you got past the ads. The ads generated much revenue for Pulitzer and his flagship newspaper, the New York World.

Today, the World Almanac looks very different, and contains no ads. It still has about 1,000 pages (1,008, to be exact) and costs $14.99 in paperback. It includes a year in review, along with gobs of information on most any topic you could imagine. I recently bought an electronic version of the almanac for $12.99, with a searchable table of contents that instantly takes you to any topic you would want to read.  Here is a sample page:






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