Joe’s recent post filled me with a sense of pathos (bathos?), and not just for what was, but for what might have been.

I’m referring to the brief, two-year run of Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac brought to us by the minds behind The Utne Reader. In 2004 I got the very first edition, and it made for literal hours of engaging reading. Naturally the volume included some very Utneish ooey gooey astrology, but there was also an engrossing discussion of phenology (a sort of armchair naturalism that perfectly blends the love of Mother Earth with cold hard science), a guide to urban dwellers such as pigeons and rats, and essays on “Foraging” and the “Joys of Walking.” The book’s 348 pages were packed with information, and this was what an almanac was always supposed to be.

That last sentence is, perhaps, a slight misstatement. Early almanacs likely didn’t provide farmers with much they didn’t already know, but they did concentrate the information in an immediate and accessible place. Planting schedules, information on seasonal change and the like were interspersed with the sort of pithy editorialism that made Benjamin Franklin famous. He was, in a sense, the inspiration for the 2005 Cosmo Doogood, and while the information it provided was somewhat less crucial to my livelihood than growing times would be to a farmer, the almanac did concentrate useful info in an accessible and engaging format.

Before I got past April, however, I left the book on a bus and lost it forever.

When 2006 rolled around I picked myself out the second issue. Already, something had changed. The astrological commentary, which had only gently intruded into the ‘05 edition, now filled page after page of exercises meant to be synced to the lunar month. Despite this, the almanac itself was thinner, less useful, less helpful. The old cover had been a stark and iciclish Chrysler building rising through a blue sky. The new edition featured a collection of hand-drawn birds perched on a weather vane. Not a bad image, but it couldn’t match the vigorous evocation of the original. It would seem that funds were running short for this project; neither volume sold particularly well, and no Urban Almanac was issued for 2007.

Quite simply, the book was great for a rather limited crowd of people: liberal urban yuppies with an ear for science and a bit of whimsy. But, there it is: even Eric Utne’s name wasn’t able to move enough copies, and this probably derives in part from the fact that said liberal yuppies go hunting for almanacs about as often as farmers go digging through The Utne Reader. For me, the individual fan, there was only one option. I went on Amazon last year and bought a used edition of the original ‘05 edition. I highlighted the more-or-less timeless 75% of the issue. It isn’t as nice as getting a new almanac each year, but it certainly beats the Old Farmers’ Almanacs I’d been buying more recently.

Is there a point to all this?

If there are major changes ahead for the publishing industry due to changing economies and modes of publication, there should be a way to exploit that for opportunities. Perhaps Cosmo Doogood would have fared better as a blog or in another online venue than as a print almanac. Perhaps it could have grown into its own iPhone application. In any event, its stay with us was too brief.

A few of us will even miss it.

So for every glass we raise to great publications that have fallen, let us also remember those we’ve likely never noticed.