Whitaker’s Almanack 1869: Facsimile Edition fi rst published in Great Britain 2014

Copyright © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First Published 1868 by J. Whitaker

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DPwww.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney

ISBN 978-1-4729-0708-0

COVER ILLUSTRATIONTh e frontispiece which has appeared in each edition of Whitaker’s Almanack since 1868.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Whitaker’s is a registered trade mark of J. Whitaker and Sons Ltd, Registered Trade Mark Nos. (UK) 1322125/09; 13422126/16 and 1322127/41; (EU) 19960401/09, 16, 41, licensed for use by A & C Black (Publishers) Ltd, a subsidiary of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Th e publishers make no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that take place.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EDITORIAL STAFFProject Editors: Ruth Northey; Oli Lurie

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

PREFACE TO THE FACSIMILE EDITION

Th e fi rst edition of Whitaker’s Almanack was published on 10 December 1868. Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 31 years and Gladstone had been Prime Minister for just seven days.

Th e compilation of that very fi rst edition must have been a task of the utmost enormity. Even now, with all our modern-day innovations, the phone, the internet and email, the task of updating Whitaker’s annually remains one of giant proportions. It is nearly impossible to conceive in this day and age how Joseph Whitaker even began such an extensive undertaking. Where did he fi nd the thousands of facts, fi gures and statistics relating not just to Great Britain, but to all the colonies and countries of the world as well? Th e fact that he would have done all this by post, makes the existence of this book truly remarkable.

Joseph Whitaker was born in 1820 the son of a silversmith, and began his career in books at an early age as an apprentice at Parker’s, a scholarly bookshop in Oxford. He moved to London when the company sent him there to open a branch on the Strand, and it was in the capital that Whitaker became involved in publishing, founding the Penny Post, a monthly church magazine, in 1849.

During the 1850s, he was an editor at Th e Gentleman’s Magazine in charge of the correspondence pages. Th is required him to answer a selection of readers’ questions that were notoriously broad in their scope, and it was here that Joseph consequently accumulated a substantial collection of invaluable newspaper cuttings, government statistics, and questions and answers from a variety of sources.

In addition to his work at Th e Gentleman’s Magazine, he founded and edited Th e Bookseller, the magazine for the book trade that continues to this day. It is thought that it was his growing number of fi nancial dependants – he married twice and fathered 13 children – that prompted his decision to publish his collection of facts as an almanack. Joseph Whitaker edited his Almanack up to his death in 1895, and was succeeded by his son Cuthbert, later Lt.-Col. Sir Cuthbert Whitaker.

Despite the immediacy of the Almanack’s ‘establishment’ status – just ten years later it was considered worthy of a space in the ‘time capsule’ buried beneath Cleopatra’s Needle on London’s Embankment – it is unlikely that Joseph Whitaker could have imagined that 146 years later, Whitaker’s would still be published annually.

Ruth Northey Executive Editor, Whitaker’s W: www.whitakersalmanack.comE: whitakersalmanackteam@bloomsbury.com T: @WhitakersAlmnck

http://bloomsbury.com/uk/whitakers-almanack-1869-9781472907080/