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Pamphleteering

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This is the Baroque Cycle page for pamphletteering

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A modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729) is Jonathan Swift's classic satiric pamphlet is likely something akin to what Drake Waterhouse and his wiley sons would have printed.

Authored entries

Pamphlet

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 stapled at the crease to make a simple book. Librarians consider a pamphlet to be any paperback book with 49 pages or less, that is not aimed at children. Some Britons are considering calling the humble comic book a pamphlet.

Pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information to 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. The storage of individual pamphlets requires special consideration because they can be easily crushed or torn when shelved alongside hardcover books. For this reason, they should either be kept in file folders in a file cabinet, or kept in boxes that have approximately the dimensions of a hardcover book and placed vertically on a shelf.

A form of propaganda dissemination which became popular as soon as the printing press became widely used. While the bible was the most frequently printed book during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, pamphlets, in the form of the libel and the broadside, were a popular form of political expression which monarchs had difficulty supressing. By the end of the seventeenth century the most effective means of persuasion and communication was the pamphlet, which created influential moral and political communities of readers, and thus formed a ‘public sphere’ of popular, political opinion.

Topics ranged from Elizabethan religious controversy, the book trade, the distribution of books and pamphlets, pamphleteering in the English Civil War, women and gender, and print in the Restoration to out and out political bickering.

Some Famous Pamphleteers

  1. The Acacians, were an Arian sect which first emerged into distinctness as an ecclesiastical party some time before the convocation of the joint synods of Ariminum (Rimini) and Seleucia in 359. Isaac Newton was an Arian.
  2. Daniel Defoe became a famous pamphleteer, journalist and novelist at a time of the birth of the novel in the English language, and thus fairly ranks as one of its progenitors.
  3. Andrew Fletcher and his mostly Whig English counterparts were strongly opposed by Daniel Defoe's pamphleteering handiwork and after of the Union of parliaments in 1707 the militia question almost went away for nearly forty years.
  4. Percy Bysshe Shelley published a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, which resulted in his expulsion from Oxford.
  5. Cotton Mather wrote many pamphlets upon piracy.

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