Bickerstaff's Plymouth almanack, for the year of our Lord 1786 ..
Subtitle: Calculated for the meridian of Boston, but will serve without essential variation for the adjacent states. : [Four lines of verse]
Series: Early American imprints -- no. 19374
Publisher: Printed and sold by Nathaniel Coverly. Also may be had by the booksellers in Boston, by the gross, dozen or single.
Published: 1785
Place of publication: Plymouth [Mass.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 24
Notes: Evans erroneously attributed the almanack to Benjamin West, as he did most of those published during this period under the Bickerstaff pseudonym. Identical in content and typography, excepting the first word of the title, with Weatherwise's Plymouth almanack for 1786, by the same publisher. Calculated by Samuel Stearns. The calculations and astronomical notes on the calendar pages duplicate those in Thomas's New-Hampshire & Vermont almanack for 1786, except that Thomas's, devoting two pages to each month, has several more columns of calculations, and also gives aspects, which are lacking in Bickerstaff. The "remarkable days, observations, &c." found in Thomas are inserted by the publisher.

A letter from Stearns to Isaiah Thomas in the manuscript collection of the American Antiquarian Society, dated 25 Oct. 1785, shows Stearns to have been the calculator of Thomas's almanac. Bickerstaff predicts four eclipses for 1786, and Stearns was the only New England almanac calculator to omit the fifth--of the sun, Dec. 20. This is the subject of his letter, cited above, to Thomas, who subsequently added a note about a possible fifth to the eclipse predictions in his almanac. Bickerstaff also mistakenly predicts an eclipse of the moon for Aug. 9 instead of July 11, an error not repeated in Thomas.

Advertised in the Plymouth journal, Nov. 1, 1785, for publication Nov. 15.

Signatures: [A]⁴ B-C⁴.

Evans 19374

Drake, M. Almanacs, 3362