Established in 1763, the Ant Farmer's Almanack began as a monthly broadsheet serving Plague-of-Locusts, Pennsylvania, a utopian community founded on the belief that Rock, Paper, Scissors could ward off the gout, "ill bodily humours" and Newton's Second Law of Physics.
Little is known about the Almanack's founder aside from rumors he had fled Philadelphia under a cloud, fired from his apprenticeship with Benjamin Franklin for "...deficient aptitude for health, wealth or wisdom".
Plague-of-Locusts was burned to the ground by Hessian mercenaries quartered there during the American Revolution. Scholars debate whether this was a deliberate act of brutality or a tragic miscalculation about how long it takes to cook sauerbraten. Either way, the fire destroyed the Almanack's offices, printing press and charred the "k" in its name beyond repair.
Publication resumed in New York in 1801, this time as a daily tabloid. Just three years later, in his final hours, having been mortally wounded in a duel with Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton was read to aloud from that day's issue of the Ant Farmer's Almanac until he begged for death.
After decades as a political tract agitating first for, and then later against, the takeover by Freemasons of the U.S. Patent Office, the Ant Farmer's Almanac was sold to the Pullman Car Company, where it became the in-carriage magazine for First Class railroad passengers. In this era, it published comic light verse, flattering profiles of robber barons and advice on beating servants.
The Almanac languished from the late 1880s until, oh, let's say, 1913. That year enterprising Swedish immigrant Sven "Golly" Börk bought the name for a song ("Wait 'till the Sun Shines, Nellie"), printed it quarterly on recycled ticker tape from parades down Broadway, and sold copies from his pushcart on the Lower East Side. Despite marketing a Swedish language humor magazine in a neighborhood full of recently arrived immigrants from Italy, Börk's hard work paid off when, less than a decade later, he earned a fortune making bathtub gin.
Revived in 1968, the Ant Farmer's Almanac became an "underground" weekly, printed by running stuck-together sheets of Zig-Zag rolling papers through a mimeograph machine. Its erratic publishing schedule, haphazard editing ("Anarchy by committee," said one critic), and the widespread sentiment, even among the staff, that it was "A complete waste of perfectly good rolling papers, man" doomed the enterprise pretty much from the start.
By the 1980s, a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions had reduced the Ant Farmer's Almanac to little more than a tax write-off shell of its former self. The stock market crash of 1987 hit its corporate owners particularly hard because they were standing nearby at the time.
The Almanac became a free agent in 1991 and, although several teams initially expressed interest, it was never signed and receded into obscurity.
In 2003, the domain name antfarmersalmanac.com was bought by writer and dotcom millionaire-manque L.K. Peterson (whereabouts unknown). The rest, as they say, is history (see above).