Père Ubu's Illustrated Almanac

First published in 1899, Père Ubu’s Almanac is Alfred Jarry’s answer to the annually published almanac, a format which provided ordinary people with the forecasts that helped them tend their crops, fish their waters and mark their religious holidays for centuries until it was superseded in 1988 by the invention of Hello! magazine. Offering a unique and irreverent insight into the cultural and political landscape of Paris on the cusp of the 20th century, Ubu’s Almanac was created by Jarry in 1898 along with some friends, artistic contemporaries and colleagues at the Mercure de France, including Claude Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard (who created the illustrations), Rachilde, Pierre Quillard, André-Ferdinand Hérold and Marcel Collière. It’s a multidimensional collage of found text, in-jokes, puns and contemporary cultural references, written during the height of the political scandal that would come to be known as the Dreyfus Affair. This, the first English translation, mimics the original in its shape and formatting.