In the major cities with vibrant printing cultures – New York, Philadelphia, Boston and so forth – almanacs were plentiful and varied.

Because they were functional references, the 18th century almanac typically did not include many illustrations, although some presented remarkable woodcuts. One recurrent American almanac image was that depicting a kind of universal man surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. The body of this dissected man shows his vital organs correlated to the external influences of the planets.

Even 18th century American medicine knew better than this, but professional medicine was not yet universal. The common man depended on himself and the natural world around him for his cures. In some ways we are not too different. Horoscopes and zodiacal references still appear in daily newspapers and popular sites on the internet.

How refreshing then is it to see this human-faced sun from Poulson’s 1789 almanac! This is not a typical image and was included here to mark an unusual event that year. But this illustration too, however, straddles the worlds of science and popular understandings of the world.

Here we have contrasted the well-known, regular astronomical event of the Transit of Mercury, first observed in the seventeenth century, with an anthropomorphic sun. This benign looking visage passively reveals the path of the planet Mercury across the face of the sun.

Note, too, the compass ring surrounding the face is oriented in reverse, with East on the left. In this way, the 18th century almanac (ever the useful reference) could be held up in front of the viewer and used to locate this astronomical happening in real time.

Today it seems we only find suns with faces on the refrigerators of proud parents of kindergarteners or on our boxes of Raisin Bran cereal. The sun abides!