Day Fifty-Five : History of Pamplets

Friday 31st January 2020

On Friday I took the time catch up on the redoing the poster, what I did instead was make a video. I hope it is okay, I sort of shut down everything quite quickly so I don't know if it even saved properly. We had a lecture on the history of leaflets, pamphlets and flyers. Here is what I learnt, sorry that it is not my words.

Before leaflets, information was given town criers. Back in the Dark Ages, if you had announcement to make, you could go the down the village square, assume the town criers stance and start shouting. But the trouble with this was that the Chinese whisper effect would severely mess with the message.

A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who produces or distributes pamphlets. The invention of the printing press in Germany in 1450 changed everything, where once the written word belonged to the rich and powerful. During the British Civil Wars there was a 'print explosion' as both sides used printed leaflets to rally their troops and undermine their enemies. Many pamphlets from the Early Modern period were somewhat The Sun- saucy and sensational.

One popular printed printed leaflet was The Witch of the Woodland which I personally want to read. It must have been good because it was reprinted four times between 1655 and 1680.

In 1776, Thomas Paine's leaflets Common Sense lit a firecracker under the American Revolution, inspiring people to stop what they are doing and immediately fight for independence from Britain. The movement to abolish slave trade was up against the fact that only men with large properties had the vote, so they handed out print leaflets to put pressure on parliament and rally public opinion, using eye-witness accounts of the horrors of the slave trader. Their flyer design included the logo of the slave on his knees with the phrase underneath him, "Am I not a man and a brother?"

Nowadays, pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information and religious treaties. Pamphlets functioned in place of magazine articles before the magazine era which ended in the nineteenth century. The women's movement used printed flyers to get the sisterhood riled about the injustice of being denied the vote. In the Second World War, massive quantities of leaflets were dropped from air via plane, rocket, shell and balloon in a propaganda war to influence the people on the ground.

With the advent of the colour photocopier in the 1970s every counter culture group could use cheap leaflet printing to advance their cause. Recent developments in software men that ow every single one of us can produce leaflets to look however we want them to.