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

In ancient Rome, the first days of each monthwere called calends. These days, the debtors went to the lenders to pay monthly interest. About what they made records in 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 much in Russia, the massive annualthe calendar appeared due to Peter I. First published in 1708, it was also called a month-old, 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 moon, the timing of agricultural work, weather and illness, and contained a lot of useful information in those days.

But, alas, this distant ancestor, who inrelatives modern tear-off calendar, the people closer did not. 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 XIXcentury and is associated with the name of the entrepreneur, book publisher and enlightener Ivan Sytin. By that time, the monopoly on the publication of calendars was over, 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, each Russian family could, at an affordable price, buy a universal reference book for all occasions.

Having listened to Leo's remarks and adviceTolstoy, Sytin introduced 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.

During the Soviet era, the tear-off calendar retainedits information 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.

Silent, but powerful evidence of his popularity- thick shared notebooks, in which our grandparents, moms and dads annually pasted scraps 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 anglers, 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!