The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Almanac Reaches the Printer — Baltimore, 1791

A printing house on a Baltimore street, the press room behind the counter, late in the year before the printing season

late in the year 1791 — a Baltimore printing house taking in copy for the next year's almanacs, a stack of hand-computed ephemeris tables carried in from a farm outside the city, the season's type not yet set

A year's worth of sky, worked out by hand at a farmhouse table, arrives on a counter smelling of lampblack. This breach reads the APPRENTICE IN THE PRESS ROOM in Baltimore, late 1791: a stack of ephemeris tables delivered by a free Black farmer who calculated every eclipse, conjunction and tide himself, and a master printer who checks two columns against a rival almanac and finds them exact before he sets a single letter. The world's argument about who is fit to do such work is held in the background, never staged. The witness is read only at the ink block and the press bed. The fragment is the subject's own: the moment somebody's work was checked in front of them and simply held up — and the memory beneath it of a time your own labor was tested by someone with the authority to dismiss it, and was not dismissed.

From the record

Benjamin Banneker, a free Black farmer in Maryland, computed by hand the ephemeris tables — positions of sun and moon, eclipses, conjunctions and tides — for an almanac for the year 1792
his calculations were examined and vouched for by others before publication, and the work was found accurate
the almanac was printed at Baltimore late in 1791 and issued for 1792, and editions were sold in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia
almanacs of the period were set in hand-composed metal type, the forme inked with leather-covered ink balls and printed a sheet at a time on a wooden hand press
copy for the next year's almanacs had to reach the printer well before the season, since ephemeris tables were useless once the year began

The era door

a plank shop door with a small glazed pane, the sill worn hollow by boots, an iron latch black with printer's ink

BALTIMORE — LATE 1791

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037