Calendar and Almanac Publishers Editing and Proofreading Services

A calendar or almanac is a reference product with a hard expiry date and no possibility of correction. It ships in September for a year that starts in January, and every date, moon phase, tide table, public holiday and sunrise time in it is either right or is a defect sitting on a customer's wall for twelve months. Unlike almost any other publication, the errors are self-announcing: a reader discovers them on the day, in a way they remember and tell people about.

We edit what calendar, almanac, diary and yearbook publishers produce — date grids and day-of-week verification, public and religious holiday listings across jurisdictions, astronomical and tidal data presentation, seasonal and agricultural content, anniversary and "on this day" entries, caption and image credit text, planner and diary front matter, contributor entries for yearbooks and annuals, licensing and permissions documentation for images and data, cover and packaging copy, retail and trade catalogue text, and the house checklists and verification procedures that catch errors before plate. Our editors treat this as a data-verification job as much as a language one, and we work to your source hierarchy rather than to general knowledge.

The verification pass on dated content is the part of the process that determines whether the year goes well, and it fails in predictable places rather than randomly. Movable feasts calculated for the wrong year; holidays observed on a different day when they fall at a weekend, with rules that differ by jurisdiction; a leap year; a public holiday newly created or abolished since last edition; astronomical data given for one time zone and printed for another; and last year's file reused with the dates advanced but the day names not rechecked. We build the checklist around those specific failure modes rather than around a general instruction to proof carefully, we require each dated fact to carry its source and the date it was checked, and we make sure the same fact appearing in two places — the grid and the notes page — is verified once and propagated rather than typed twice. Almanacs that survive their year do so because someone wrote the checklist, not because someone read the proofs.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished editions and licensed data supplied under agreement. We are editors rather than astronomers, and we do not calculate or certify astronomical, tidal or calendrical data — that must come from your authoritative sources. What we can do is check internal consistency, verify against the sources you supply, and make the presentation clear.