A library you can read in any order.

Almanac began in 2019 as a shared spreadsheet of things worth re-reading. Today it is an independent archive of essays, notes, conversations and films, each one numbered, filed by subject and kept in print for good.

It is run by four people and paid for by about 2,300 readers who chip in £4 a month. There are no ads, no sponsored posts and no tracking beyond a plain count of how many people opened each letter. When the money runs short we publish less, not worse.

Every piece is edited twice: once on screen, then once on paper, read aloud at the kitchen table on Thursday evenings. If a sentence makes us stumble out loud, it goes. New entries are filed next to old ones, and the old ones get read more than you would think.

House rules

Everything is catalogued

Every entry gets a number, a subject drawer and an author file. Nothing floats; everything can be found again. The index is rebuilt by hand each quarter, which is slow, and which is how we catch our mistakes.

Nothing goes out of print

We never unpublish. Corrections are appended in the margins, like a librarian’s pencil note, with the date and what changed. If a writer changes their mind, they write a new entry and we link the two.

Written for the long now

No trending topics, no hot takes. If it won’t be worth reading in ten years, it doesn’t get filed. We would rather publish one piece a week that lasts than five that expire by Friday.

Colophon

Established

2019, as a spreadsheet

Published

Weekly, on Sundays

Typefaces

Switzer

Built with

Framer

Correspondence

hello@almanac.site

Contributors

Ines Vautrin

Editor-in-chief

Theo Marlow

Contributing writer

Amara Okafor

Host, The Signal podcast

Kenji Arai

Photographer & field editor

Start with the index, or let us send you three entries every Sunday.

Open the index

Get the letter