2 That said, the preponderance of almanacs in the eighteenth century - when Boston supplanted Cambridge as handmaiden to the American almanac by way of establishing independent printing presses - suggests that no successful effort was made to eliminate them. While Tyler hinted at a kind of perpetuating legacy of almanacs ("the one universal book of modern literature"), scholars such as Bernard Capp and Herbert Leventhal buried the persuasive almanac beside the persuasive astrological chart sometime prior to the dawn of the eighteenth century. Having long suffered literary scorn, the almanac was, in Tyler's appraisal, the "most despised, most prolific, most indispensable of books, which every man uses, and no man praises." It was, Tyler continued, "… the very quack, clown, pack-horse, and pariah" of American literature, but also "the supreme and only literary necessity - preferable even to the Bible or daily newspaper. NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERARY HISTORIAN Moses Coit Tyler, in his 1881 survey A History of American Literature, assigned the almanac to polar ends of the early American mind. The American Almanac and the Astrology Factorby Keith A.
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