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D’Isreali picked one of the most colorful quotes for his articles, and I can’t resist quoting it as well, as it’s so superbly purple:

From Pamphlets may be learned the genius of the age, the debates of the learned, the follies of the ignorant, the bévues of government, and the mistakes of the courtiers. Pamphlets furnish beaus with their airs, coquets with their charms. Pamphlets are as modish ornaments to gentlewomen’s toilets as to gentlemen’s pockets; they carry reputation of wit and learning to all that make them their companions; the poor find their account in stall-keeping and in hawking them; the rich find in them their shortest way to the secrets of church and state. There is scarce any class of people but may think themselves interested enough to he concerned with what is published in pamphlets, either as to their private instruction, curiosity, and reputation, or to the public advantage and credit; with all which both ancient and modern pamphlets are too often over familiar and free.—In short, with pamphlets the booksellers and stationers adorn the gaiety of shop-gazing. Hence accrues to grocers, apothecaries, and chandlers, good furniture, and supplies to necessary retreats and natural occasions. In pamphlets lawyers will meet with their chicanery, physicians with their cant, divines with their Shibholeth. Pamphlets become more and more daily amusements to the curious, idle, and inquisitive; pastime to gallants and coquets; chat to the talkative; catch-words to informers; fuel to the envious; poison to the unfortunate; balsam to the wounded; employment to the lazy; and fabulous materials to romancers and novelists.

Essentially, after the near 100-page Preface, Davies gathers together his ‘Republik of Pamphlets,’ sampling just about every sort of pamphlet you can imagine—how tos, sermons, religious doctrine, political doctrine, polemics, poetry, comedy—and then quite literally catalogues them, one by one, discussing their relative merits and influence, so far as he can measure it.

After the Preface and before the catalogue begins, he does attempt an interesting trick, i.e. to pinpoint both the origin of the pamphlet as a literary form and also the origin of the word. The word pamphlet actually has a disputed etymology which can be discerned in your better dictionaries, and Davies attempts to puzzle it all out. But, like a true Englishman, he gives his countrymen the bulk of the credit for the thing in his very first point:

How Exotical and Foreign forever the Word Pamphlet may seem, as to its sound and structure, ’tis nevertheless so much a true-born English Denison, that ’tis scarce ever known or adopted, or even adapted to any other Idiom in the World, but to the English Language alone.

You can view a scan of the frontispiece of the book and other pamphlets at The Pamphlet Collection Flickr photo pool.

Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Alexis
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It wasn’t easy finding a history of pamphlets, and I have yet to find anything specifically on American pamphlets. I gather this is to be expected, given that it’s a type of literature that is both varied and easily destroyed or misplaced. There’s really no single thru-line in pamphlets, their subject-matter runs the gamut. Contemporary references to pamphlets almost entirely seem to concern primers produced by the government or for-profit companies instructing you on the many ways to be either a good citizen or a good customer, or both.

What I did find, initially (I say initially because I hope to find something more in the future, as my research has really only just begun) was a reference to a book by one Myles Davies’—Eikon Mikro-Biblike Sive Icon Libellorum, or a Critical History of Pamphlets, published in the early 1700s. The reference was made by Isaac D’Israeli (the father of the more famous Benjamin D’Israeli—the British Prime Minister) in his own book, Curiosities of Literature, which you can find in toto online. D’Israeli’s article on pamphlets was quite short, and so I nearly expected Davies’ tract to be, itself, a pamphlet. But we’re in the 18th century, in England, when people believed in and admired exhaustive, authoritarian behemoths of research that claimed to be the final word on any matter at all, no matter how broad or foggy.

And so, upon beginning my research at the NYPL’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library, I should have been little surprised to find a 450 page tract, that looks to have at least one additional volume. I did not get to handle the original—a rare pleasure that I hope to get on at least a few occasions in my research. However, thanks to the British Library I was able to skim scans of the entire first volume online from the comfort of Room 315.

I’ll get to some of the contents of that in Part 2, but I also wanted to take a second to try to figure out who Myles Davies was, as it’s not entirely clear, save to say that he was a member of the Inns of Court in London with intellectual ambitions. The Oxford Biography Index lists simply: Davies, Myles (b. 1662, d. in or after 1719), bibliographer. A critical volume on polemic publishing by Cambridge University Press apparently took note of the book, and it seems Davies had his finger on some facet of the zeitgeist in the 18th century, but there’s little else I could find in a casual search for references to the book. Most historians and academics seem to have a greater interest in his Athenæ Britannicæ.

Posted on December 22nd, 2007 by Alexis
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Have you been handed a pamphlet on the street on in the subway or while traveling that you’ve kept for one reason or another? Because the images were so striking or the message was so compelling? Scan them and send them over to The Pamphlet Collection in one of the following ways:

1. Add them to your Flickr page, tag them with ‘pamphletcollection‘ and then post them in The Pamphlet Collection Photo Pool.
2. Post the images and write about them on your own blog and tag it in del.icio.us. with ‘pamphletcollection‘.
3. Post them on the web and write a comment on the blog linking to the photos.

We’re seeking pamphlets (primarily religious and political, but all are welcome), primarily in English, but if there are really strong graphics or images we’ll take them in other languages—especially if you can help us translate them. We would also LOVE to receive historic pamphlets, i.e. pamphlets of years of centuries past that you have bought or researched or copied for one reason or the other.

What is a pamphlet?
According to UNESCO a pamphlet is a “Non-periodic printed publication of at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the public.”

Posted on December 1st, 2007 by Alexis
Filed under: Call for Submissions | No Comments »

The idea for New Acquisition had been sitting in my filing cabinet for some time, since my last year of college. Though the idea was far from complete and had a very different scope than what the thing has become, but it was the seed that was important. And the name, New Acquisition. I took the name, a common phrase in art museums, from the notes posted on the wall of the Tate Modern next to Susan Hiller’s piece From the Freud Museum, which interested me at the time, both because I was a big fan of the Freud Museum in London and because I liked the piece.

It wasn’t until the summer of last year, 2006, when I was considering what project I might propose for the Puffin Foundation Artists Grant that I began to conceive of the thing in it’s entirety: the pamphlet with original literary and artistic content, printed cheaply and distributed for free. In my original application to the Puffin Foundation I didn’t include the installation and performance, only the online aspects of the project. The performance piece came later, in discussions with friends and when I started to think about the problem of distributing the pamphlets and when I was thinking about how I might make use of one of the Chashama spaces. From there it grew to incorporate the distribution of the material as a key part of the project—i.e. how could I best exploit the distribution as a means of really getting people to interact with the pamphlets, rather than just chuck them.

NOTE: A lot of people ask about the fact that so many of the pamphlets will be thrown away, but for me, that’s a big part of the project. Each iteration of the project will involve the printing and distributing of thousands of these flyers, recipients will not pay for these flyers and the vast majority of people receiving them will not have intended to get them. The life of the pamphlets in many ways represents the open nature of the work. People are free to interpret, do with, pass on and discard the pamphlets as they please, in the same way that people who approach a work of art hanging on a wall or a film go through essentially the process without having a physical thing to take away with them. The physical thing extends the life of the piece in interesting ways. A woman working in a building nearby to our first series of performances found one discarded on the floor of her elevator, took it back to her office read it and put it in her purse to take home. Later in the day, upon leaving the office, she encountered the actors on the street, made the connection and came in to see the performance. Other people notice the pamphlets in other people’s hands, notice them in a trash can down the block, wonder what the meaning is—is it religious? is it political? is it selling something? is it art? is it a joke? The interactive nature of the performance allows them to tease out a variety of different meanings and ideas about the piece and the variety of associations that we all make about people on the street who hand out pamphlets all come into play.

Posted on November 26th, 2007 by Alexis
Filed under: About the Project | No Comments »