The Search Begins, Part 1

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.

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