A tear-off calendar is a small encyclopedia for every day

In ancient Rome, the first days of each month were called calends. These days, debtors went to lenders to pay monthly interest. What they made notes in the books, called calendars. So initially to the calculation of the days they had nothing to do with. And even more, no educational function was carried.

In Russia, for a long time, the monthly calendar was used, in fact, the church calendar, in which, in addition to the days of memory of the saints and the circle of church holidays, in fact, there was nothing.

Like many things in Russia, the massive annual calendar appeared thanks to Peter I. First published in 1708, it was also called a month-old calendar, but, in fact, it was already a civil, and not an Orthodox, calendar. Many modern features he subsequently acquired due to the associate of Peter I Yakov Bruce. Bryusov's calendar described the eclipses of the sun and the moon, the timing of agricultural work, weather and disease, contained a lot of useful information in those days.

But, alas, this distant ancestor, whose relatives have a modern tear-off calendar, did not become closer to the people. In 1727, the capital's (St. Petersburg) Academy of Sciences took over the exclusive right to publish it. Calendars were published in small editions, each of which was intended for a certain estate in content, and not everyone could afford it.

The second birth of the calendar occurred at the end of the XIX century and is associated with the name of the entrepreneur, publisher and educator Ivan Sytin. By that time, the monopoly on the publication of the calendars had ended, and Sytin immediately seized on the brilliant idea. "Universal Calendar", presented to them at the Nizhny Novgorod exhibition in 1884, made a splash. In fact, every Russian family could, at an affordable price, buy a universal reference book for all occasions.

Having listened to the remarks and advice of Leo Tolstoy, Sytin made many corrections to his calendar, the direct heirs of which are all modern tear-off calendars. The subsequent success of the publication was staggering. From 1885 to 1916 in the Russian Empire, where only one third of the population was considered literate, the circulation of the calendar grew from 6 to 21 million copies. This edition was truly popular: it was carefully stored on a par with the Bible, on it they learned to read.

Under the Soviet regime, the tear-off calendar retained its informational and educational function, however, due to mass popularity and multi-million circulation, its content was carefully controlled by the bodies responsible for ideology. Like many other high-demand goods, a modest voucher calendar was enlisted in the ranks of the deficit.

A dumb but powerful testimony to his popularity is thick common notebooks into which our grandparents, moms and dads annually glued the clippings from torn pages-days: useful tips and recipes, patterns and patterns of knitting, children's poems and fairy tales.

... The XXI century has come, where it is enough to press the button of a mobile phone or two clicks with a computer mouse to call the calendar . Do you think a tear-off calendar is no longer popular? No matter how it is! It is still produced, and its variety is amazing: for housewives and fishermen, for fitness and dieters, medical, astrological, garden, erotic ...

There are even special programs for smartphones, scrupulously, with all the inherent details recreating the image, which had a tear-off calendar in those days when it was read on a sixth of the land!