We’ve made up our own Dance Away Your Debt Dance, but we want to see yours too. Post it on YouTube, send us a link, send us illustrations, describe it here in the comments section.

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.

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.

There are a few different ways you can support the project. And when you support a New Acquisition project, we’ll recognize your support here on the site, in the programs for our performances, and on individual pamphlets if you support an entire print-run.

$25 – Sponsors 100 pamphlets
$50 – Sponsors 200 pamphlets
$100 – Sponsors 400 pamphlets
$1,000 – Sponsors an entire print-run (i.e. the cost of printing all the pamphlets for a single New Acquisition project like Dance Away Your Debt)

Or support the artists who contribute to the project:

$100 – commission one of the artists for a project
$300 – commission all three artists for a project

Or fully support a performance for $500!

Are you a printer or do you know a printer who might want to help with an in-kind donation of printing services.

There are also other ways to support the project, contact us for more details at contact AT newacquisition.org.

NEW ACQUISITION is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions on behalf of NEW ACQUISITION may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

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.”