The Constance Wanderer
[ALMANACK.]
XIX Jahrhundert. Der Wanderer am Bodensee. Jahr 1833. Constance (Konstanz), the widow of Josef Meinrad Bannhard, [1833].
4to, pp. [44]; with one folding leaf included in pagination, two full-page woodcuts, calendar in red and black; a few small marks; a very good copy in original printed and illustrated yellow wrappers with woodcut to front cover depicting Constance and its Lake; slight wear to extremities; ‘94,768’ in manuscript to head of front cover.
A seemingly unrecorded almanack for 1833, issued in Constance by the widow of Josef Meinrad Bannhard.
The volume opens with a calendar for the year giving saints’ days, astrological data, and information on phases of the moon and the weather, alongside old-fashioned prognostics, e.g. good weather around St Vincent’s Day boding well for the rest of the year. A blank table follows for recording income and expenditure over a two-month period. Biographical information on members of the House of Baden is then followed by prose pieces on Catholic feast days, on hiking around Lake Constance (depicted in a woodcut to the front cover), and on the Polish-Russian War of 1830–31, illustrated with a fold-out woodcut of the battle of Praga. Various short stories and anecdotes, and a list of fairs and markets round off the work.
Bannhard appears to have begun almanack publishing in the 1820s, and was succeeded upon his death in 1831 by his widow. The business was later taken over and expanded by their son-in-law Jakob Stadler.