Due to their low cost and ease of production, pamphlets often have been used to popularize political or religious ideas.
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. In order to count as a pamphlet,
UNESCO requires a publication (other than a
periodical) to have 'at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages'; a longer item is a
book.
Etymology
The word
pamphlet for a small work (
opuscule) issued by itself without covers came into
Middle English ca 1387 as
pamphilet or
panflet, generalized from a twelfth-century
amatory comic poem with a satiric flavor,
Pamphilus, seu de Amore ("Pamphilus: or, Concerning Love"), written in Latin. Pamphilus's name was derived from Greek, meaning "friend of everyone". The poem was popular and widely copied and circulated on its own, forming a slim
codex.
Its modern connotations of a tract concerning a contemporary issue was a product of the heated arguments leading to the
English Civil War; this sense appeared in 1642. In some European languages other than English, this secondary connotation, of a disputaceous tract, has come to the fore: compare
libelle, from the Latin
libellus, denoting a "little book".
In Spanish,
panfleto is a brief written or libel generally aggressive or defamatory. By extension it is used for political propaganda written. Not to be confused with the term English pamphlet, from which derives, as it does not contain the negative connotations of the Spanish and translated more correctly as
folleto.
Pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information and 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.
Footnotes
See also
