Vintage calendars are back!
While more and more people can't imagine their lives without electronic devices like smartphones or smartwatches with so handy apps with so many useful options for organizing our days, a certain percent of mankind still prefer classic calendars with five or six rows and seven columns. Even more - there are many who find old calendars so visually appealing the insist to hang them on the walls even if they don't intend to use them as planners/organizers. So-called vintage calendars with designs, especially with designs from the second half of 19th and the first half of 20th century are coming back too.
It seems people rediscovered the charm of the old masters like Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Eugene Grasset, Teo van Hoytema or Alphonse Mucha and try to include their old calendars in today's homes. We'll try to present these (and other) artists with their best work and by the way, enjoy in versatile trivia connected with their work.
Did you know?
- It's next to impossible to find who decided to use a seven-day-a-week pattern for the first time because we can trace it to ancient China, Japan, Babylon, and Egypt. It's very likely correlated with the seven major celestial objects (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) which also gave the names to the days in so many languages (Sunday - the day of the Sun, Monday - the day of the Moon, etc.) but we don't know if this is the case in all instances where weeks had seven days. Romans officially proclaimed seven-day week by Constantine in 321 AD.
- Calendars made before the sixteenth century were not seen as planners but as perpetual tools representing the cyclic repetition of months, seasons, holidays, ... Such calendar was meant to last for years and was not a consumable like a modern calendar which serves its purpose for a very limited time (typically one year only).
- The development of printing technology made prints so cheap many companies started to print more or less useful/decorative items mainly for advertising. Calendars offered both - usefulness with a classic tabular scheme and prettiness with a picture and design which was often yet not always related to the advertiser. An addition of a quote, proverb or verse made such calendars widely available and affordable (often given for free) pieces which found a home in millions of houses all over the world.
Do we still need calendars?
While it looks the electronic planners managed to connect into all spheres of our lives, a lot of us still prefer paper and pencil or simple table where we can instantly connect different projects, ideas, obligations, etc. in unlimited ways.
Plus, classic calendar looks pretty as well.
