pamphlet

(păm'flĭt)

1. An unbound printed work, usually with a paper cover.
2. A short essay or treatise, usually on a current topic, published without a binding.

[Middle English pamflet, from Medieval Latin pamfletus, from Pamphiletus, diminutive of Pamphilus, amatory Latin poem of the 12th century, from Greek pamphilos, beloved by all : pan-, pan- + philos, beloved.]

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Pamphleteering was a means of propagating new or controversial ideas through the distribution of inexpensive and easily produced tracts or pamphlets. Because the pamphlets were brief and written in a popular style, they enjoyed tremendous circulation. Read aloud in taverns, churches, and town meetings, pamphlets became a significant means of mass communication and an essential vehicle for carrying on political debates in colonial America.

Pamphleteering had its roots in English practice, particularly during the religious controversies and political contests of the commonwealth period. Sermons, often with a political tinge, were distributed as pamphlets in colonial America. During the revolutionary period, figures such as James Otis, Stephen Hopkins, and John Dickinson debated the issue of taxation by Parliament through pamphlets. When military conflict broke out, patriots and loyalists alike engaged in pamphlet wars to justify their political choices. The most renowned pamphleteer of the American Revolution was Thomas Paine. His Common Sense was one of the strongest and most effective arguments for independence, and The Crisis papers were a powerful buttress to the morale of the patriot cause.

Americans continued to engage in pamphlet debates over issues that confronted the new government, especially the question of adopting the Constitution of the United States. Although newspapers were the forum for some of these debates—as was the case with the Federalist Papers—political opponents also used pamphlets to promote their points of view. Federalist pamphleteers included John Jay, Noah Webster, Pelatiah Webster, Tench Coxe, and David Ramsay. Representing the Antifederalists, Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, Melancthon Smith, Richard Henry Lee, Luther Martin, and James Iredell produced pamphlets in opposition.

The proliferation of newspapers in the early national period made pamphlet warfare less common, but some writers still used pamphlets to express their positions. Religious enthusiasts, reform groups, and propagators of utopian societies or economic panaceas often found the pamphlet an effective tool. Campaigns flooded the country with pamphlets to augment the circulation of newspapers or to make political attacks. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, socialists and populists used pamphlets to gain converts, and a free silver advocate produced the notorious Coin's Financial School. Propagandists during World War I, especially pacifists, utilized the pamphlet to sustain morale or refute criticism. After World War I pamphlet use declined. Increasingly, government organizations, religious groups, and learned societies continued to use pamphlets more often for informational purposes than for the propagation of controversial positions.

Bibliography

Adams, Thomas R. The British Pamphlet Press and the American Controversy, 1764–1783. Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1979.

Bailyn, Bernard, and Jane N. Garrett, eds. Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1965.

Bailyn, Bernard, and John B. Hench, eds. The Press and the American Revolution. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.

Silbey, Joel H., ed. The American Party Battle: Election Campaign Pamphlets, 1828–1876. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Wakelyn, Jon L. Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860– April 1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

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• Publications - pamphlet: thin, simply bound or stapled collection of sheets, usu. on topic of current interest

An 18th century painting of a girl with a Basket of Pamphlets

Due to their low cost and ease of production, pamphlets often have been used to popularize political or religious ideas.

A pamphlet is an unbound booklet (that is, without a hard cover or binding). It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths (called a leaflet), or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book. In order to count as a pamphlet, UNESCO requires a publication (other than a periodical) to have "at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages";^[1] a longer item is a book.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Collectibility 3 Commercial Uses 4 See also 5 Footnotes 6 External links

Etymology

The adverb pamphlet for a small work (opuscule) issued by itself without covers came into Middle English ca 1387 as pamphilet or panflet, generalized from a twelfth-century amatory comic poem with an old flavor, Pamphilus, seu de Amore ("Pamphilus: or, Concerning Love"), written in Latin.^[2] Pamphilus's name was derived from Greek, meaning "friend of everyone". The poem was popular and widely copied and circulated on its own, forming a slim codex.

The pamphlet form of literature has been used for centuries as an economical vehicle for the broad distribution of information.

Its modern connotations of a tract concerning a contemporary issue was a product of the heated arguments leading to the English Civil War; this sense appeared in 1642.^[3] In some European languages other than English, this secondary connotation, of a disputaceous tract, has come to the fore:^[4] compare libelle, from the Latin libellus, denoting a "little book".

In Spanish, panfleto is a brief writing or libel generally aggressive or defamatory. By extension, it is used for political propaganda writings. Not to be confused with the English term pamphlet, from which it derives, as it does not contain the negative connotations of the Spanish word and is translated more correctly as folleto.

Pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information and religious treatises. Pamphlets are very important in marketing as they are cheap to produce and can be distributed easily to customers. Pamphlets have also long been an important tool of political protest and political campaigning for similar reasons.

Collectibility

Due to their ephemeral nature and to wide array of political or religious perspectives given voice by the format's ease of production, pamphlets are prized by many book collectors. Substantial accumulations have been amassed and transferred to ownership of academic research libraries around the world.

Particularly comprehensive collections of American political pamphlets are housed at New York Public Library, the Tamiment Library of New York University, and the Jo Labadie collection at the University of Michigan.^[5]

Commercial Uses

The pamphlet has been widely adopted in commerce, particularly as a format for marketing communications. There are numerous purposes for the pamphlets, such as product descriptions or instructions, corporate information, events promotions or tourism guides and are used in the same way as leaflets, brochures.

See also

• Booklet
• Chapbook
• Airborne leaflet propaganda
• Brochure
• Flyer (pamphlet)
• Folded leaflets
• Thomas Paine
• Pamphleteer

Footnotes

1. ^ UNESCO definition
2. ^ OED s.v. "pamphlet".
3. ^ On-line Etymology Dictionary.
4. ^ In German, French, and Italian pamphlet often has negative connotations of slanderous libel or religious propaganda; idiomatic neutral translations of English pamphlet include "Flugblatt" and "Broschüre" in German and "Fascicule" in French. In Russian and Romanian, the word "памфлет" in Russian Cyrillic, "pamflet" in Romanian also normally connotes a work of propaganda or satire, so it is best translated as "brochure" ("брошюра" in Russian, broşură in Romanian). (DEX online - Cautare: pamflet)
5. ^ Oakley C. Johnson, Marxism in United States History Before the Russian Revolution (1876-1917). New York: Humanities Press, 1974; pg. vii.

External links

Look up pamphlet in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Randy Silverman, 1987. "Small, Not Insignificant: a Specification for a Conservation Pamphlet Binding Structure", The Book and Paper Group Annual 6. Historical overview focusing on pamphlet binding.
• 19th Century British Pamphlets Online. Information about a project that digitised 26,000 19th century pamphlets from UK research libraries.

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Common misspelling(s) of pamphlet

• pamplet

Dansk (Danish)
n. - piece, brochure
v. tr. - udsende flyveskrifter

Nederlands (Dutch)
pamflet

Français (French)
n. - (gén) brochure, tract, (Hist) pamphlet
v. tr. - écrire des pamphlets

Deutsch (German)
n. - Broschüre, Flugblatt, Streitschrift
v. - Pamphlete schreiben und herausgeben

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - φυλλάδιο, τεύχος, μπροσούρα

Italiano (Italian)
opuscolo, fascicolo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - panfleto (m), prospecto (m)

Русский (Russian)
брошюра, памфлет

Español (Spanish)
n. - folleto, panfleto, octavilla
v. tr. - distribuir panfletos

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - broschyr, häfte

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
小册子, 发小册子

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 小冊子
v. tr. - 發小冊子

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 팜플렛, 시사논문, 작은 책자
v. tr. - 선전하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - パンフレット

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) كراسه, كتيب‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮עלון, קונטרס, חוברת‬
v. tr. - ‮חילק או הפיץ עלונים‬

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