In ancient Rome, the first days of each month were called calendars. These days, debtors went to creditors to pay monthly interest. What did they record in books nicknamed calendars. So initially they had nothing to do with calculating days. And even more so, they did not carry any educational function.
For a long time in Russia they used the month-word - in fact, the church calendar, in which, in addition to the days of remembrance of the saints and the circle of church holidays, in fact, there was nothing.
Like much in Russia, the massive annual calendar appeared thanks to Peter I. First published in 1708, it was also called the month of the word, but, in fact, it was already a civil calendar, not an Orthodox one. He subsequently acquired many modern features thanks to the associate of
Peter I to Jacob Bruce. Bryusov’s calendar told about the eclipses of the Sun and the Moon, the timing of agricultural work, weather and diseases, and contained a lot of useful information in those days.
But, alas, this distant ancestor, who has a modern tear-off calendar in his relatives, did not become closer to the people. In 1727, the capital (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 rebirth of the calendar took place at the end of the 19th century and is associated with the name of the businessman, book publisher and enlightener Ivan Sytin. By that time, the monopoly on the publication of calendars had ended, and Sytin immediately seized on a brilliant idea. The Universal Calendar, presented by him at the Nizhny Novgorod Exhibition in 1884, made a splash. In fact, every Russian family could at an affordable price buy a universal reference manual for all occasions.
Listening to the comments 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 overwhelming. From 1885 to 1916, in the Russian Empire, where only a third of the population was considered literate, the calendar circulation grew from 6 to 21 million copies. This publication was truly popular: it was carefully preserved on a par with the Bible, they learned to read from it.
Under the Soviet regime, the tear-off calendar retained its informational and educational function, however, due to mass popularity and multi-million copies, its contents were carefully controlled by the authorities responsible for ideology. Like many other high-demand products, the modest tear-off calendar was credited to the ranks of the shortage.
Dumb, but weighty evidence of its popularity - thick general notebooks in which our grandparents, mothers and fathers annually pasted clippings from torn pages of the day: useful tips and recipes, patterns and knitting patterns, children's poems and fairy tales.
... The 21st century has come, where you can call up the calendar with just one click of a button on your mobile phone or two clicks of a
computer mouse. Do you think the tear-off calendar is no longer popular? No matter how! It is still being produced, and its variety is amazing: for housewives and fishers, for fitness and dieters, medical, astrological, garden, erotic ...
There are even special programs for smartphones that scrupulously, with all the inherent details, recreate the look that a tear-off calendar had in those days when it was read heavily on one sixth of the land!