CORINTH — It might not seem this way at first, but Vermont Almanac is the product of an uneasy time.

The annual publication’s fifth volume reached store shelves in late November. Weighing in at nearly 300 pages full of writing and imagery about rural Vermont, it has a deliberate heft, as if it’s designed to hold something down. Add the four previous volumes and the Almanac starts to look like a counterweight to the digital age.

“We wanted to zag as the world went” onto the internet, said Dave Mance III, co-editor of Vermont Almanac with Patrick White.

The result is a yearly immersion in Vermont’s rural life, one that’s meant to be grounded, documentary, free of politics and cant, yet open to the way the state is changing, in its climate, its population, its habits.

At a subdued launch party for Volume V last Saturday evening at the North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, the center’s director, Naomi Heindel, summed up the Almanac as “a ground-level take on rural Vermont.”

The launch party, attended by about 50 people, most of whom looked like they’d be at home in the outdoors, put Vermont in the foreground, but the larger world of climate change, digital discord and political upheaval was always there in the background.

“I’m so proud to be a part of this project,” Mance said. “In this TikTok world, we’re still making a book.”

A small team

The Almanac was hatched during the coronavirus pandemic by former staffers at Northern Woodlands, including Mance, White and Corinth resident Virginia Barlow, a forester who also founded Northern Woodlands in 1994. Another Corinth resident, Amy Peberdy, is the Almanac’s business manager.

At Saturday’s launch, and in interviews, those four co-founders expressed disquiet at the forces pulling at the state’s underpinnings.

“I think even back then (at the Almanac’s founding) we were sensing the shift in how communities stick together,” Peberdy said. The Almanac’s founders decided to rely on a small, trusted network: each other, and the many writers and artists they know across the state.

Once the four founders pivoted to Vermont Almanac, “we quickly became a team,” Barlow said.

They’ve been urged to take their publication’s model to other states, but their focus on just one small state is at once manageable and variable enough to furnish plenty of material.

The founders meet every January to talk about the larger themes they might want to explore in the next issue. So far, each volume has run chronologically, from October to September, a format that serves multiple purposes.

It starts when the larder is full and goes through winter and the growing season, Mance, who also is a maple sugarmaker, said Saturday. “We like the poetics of that, and it also fit in with ... Christmas sales,” he said.

Each month starts with an essay and includes a page or two about the weather and illustrated nature notes written by Hartland naturalist Mary Holland and Mance and Barlow. The Almanac also delves into local and state history, both with new writing and occasional stories from old newspapers. Sometimes the editors will commission and group multiple stories around a subject, from a cluster of pieces about mushroom foraging and growing to a series about race in Vermont.

“I’ve learned so many things,” White said in a phone interview from his home in Middlesex, Vt., where he operates Meadow Ridge Tree Farm. “It’s been a fun and educational five years for me.”

In looking at Vermont as it is, the Almanac depicts everything from hunting to the life cycles of farm animals to invasive worms and flooding rivers. While there are multiple perspectives, the aim is to enable a common view of the state.

“I think we’re able to have nuance and understanding,” White said. There’s a shared respect for the land, even among people who approach it from different angles.

And though the Almanac takes on tough issues, such as climate change, it steers clear of political agendas.

“If we have a message to spread, it’s spread through stories, rather than activism,” White said.

A stable format

Climate, population growth, development and, most notably, the sharp increase in property values have all emerged as threats to the state and its way of life.

Vermont has long been viewed as a place threatened by modern life. In 1993 and again in 2004, the National Trust for Historic Preservation included Vermont, the entire state, on its annual list of “America’s Most Endangered Places.”

This is generally true of pastoral places, where an influx of economic might can throw a whole culture off-kilter. A rising tide of money became a flood during the pandemic, sweeping the price of housing out of the reach of many residents.

Vermont Almanac is better positioned than many publications to take on how the state is changing. Its format is naturally dispassionate. Where journalism pays attention to news of the moment, a format wildly accelerated first by cable news and then by the internet, the Almanac situates stories within the passage of time.

A series of stories in the current volume on faith in Vermont and how it’s tied to farming and the land includes a piece by White about the state’s small but growing Muslim population. White looks at how devout Muslims find halal meat in Vermont and are starting their own farms. A Strafford couple writes about how their farm relates to their Catholic faith through the “Benedictine monastic path.” And an interview with residents of Living Tree Alliance, in Moretown, Vt., describes how the cohousing community weaves together Judaism and agriculture. It’s hard to imagine seeing three neighboring stories like these in any other publication.

A yearly struggle

While the Almanac has found its niche and defined itself over its first five years, its future doesn’t yet feel secure. Pulling together each issue has felt like a bit of a high-wire act, the founders said. Readership has grown, but slowly.

“The challenge for us has been and probably will be to promote the Almanac,” White said.

Overall, sales have grown about 6% since Vol. 1, Peberdy said, noting that the Almanac “remains an undiscovered gem.” Copies have found their way into the libraries of all of the state’s public high schools, through grant funding, and some schools use the Almanac as a teaching text. About 85% of the mailing addresses the Almanac is sent to are in Vermont, Peberdy said.

Unlike a more fleeting publication, a book remains on sale for years. People who discover Vol. V might go back in search of the first four. Between 500 and 600 copies of Vol. III sold last year after Vol. IV went on sale, White said.

The publication’s annual budget is around $165,000, Peberdy said, of which about $50,000 pays for printing, which is done in Milton, Vt., and shipping each year’s Almanac. Contributors are paid $100 to $500 per article, depending on the time and effort involved, but some of them donate their compensation back to the Almanac. “You know, ‘Give me a copy of the book,’ ” Peberdy said.

The only staff who earn any money are Peberdy, White and Mance, and freelance designer Lisa Cadieux. Barlow is retired, but still edits much of the Almanac. “I’m happy to be a volunteer,” she said.

“We didn’t pay ourselves for the first year, at all,” Peberdy said. The publication relies on sales for much of its revenue, along with sponsors (or what most publications would call ads) and donations, both from individuals and from places such as the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council.

At a cover price of $35 for this year’s Volume V, the Almanac costs nearly as much as a new hardback.

“We wish the book didn’t cost as much as it does, but it does because we believe people should be compensated,” Peberdy said.

Something to hold onto

The decision to put the Almanac out in physical form, rather than online, was made early on.

“We did always think print,” Mance said. “That was very important to us. We were very idealistic.”

“One of the things that I really philosophically believe in is reading print, something you hold in your hand, you can absorb much more deeply than you can on a screen,” he added.

There was some room for a print publication to step in and try to define living in Vermont after the 2018 closure of Vermont Life. The Almanac also pushes back against the trend toward digital in the same way that moving to Vermont can push against the trend toward modern conveniences.

“It’s very ambitious, I think, and I’m amazed they can pull it off every year,” Li Shen, a Thetford resident, said in an interview.

“People really think deeply and have deep emotions about Vermont” and “what rural life is about,” she said.

Shen, who wrote for the Almanac about Longwind Farm’s Dave Chapman and his quest to define the term “organic” as something that’s grown in the soil, also writes for a digital publication, Sidenote, that covers Thetford. The difference between print and pixels is clear to her.

It takes more work and resources to get print into the hands of readers, but there’s a payoff that digital publishing lacks. With any website “you’re in this flood of other digital stuff,” she said.

“The really bad thing about the internet is it’s so fractured,” said Shen, a visual artist who is also a member of the Thetford Selectboard. People see only the news they want to see and there are few facts held in common. “There’s a million different versions of reality going on.”

Mance doesn’t like what he sees in the internet, either. “I’ve got a 7-year-old,” he said. “I’m kind of terrified of the digital future that faces her.”

“Our book, in a way, is a stake in the ground that says, ‘This is what we value.’ ”

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.