At one time or another, the ills of the world have been blamed on everything from tight-fitting shoes to television. The Diggers wanted to abolish money, the Luddites wanted to destroy the machines. The majority of such sectarians has traditionally adopted the medium of printed matter to broadcast theories, positions, opinions. Social theorists have published provocative polemics about eugenics and population engineering. Crusading utopians and meliorists have generated a wealth of redemptive and rehabilitative circulars such as the memorably-titled Kill Your Television (anti-cathode tube), The Menace of Psychiatry (anti-mind modification), and Absinthe – Sapper of Souls (anti-alcohol). Feuding factions have produced pamphlets both pro and con concerning such issues as abortion, the legitimacy of monarchy, gun control, the right to privacy, methods for disposal of the dead, vegetarianism, even aesthetics. The germ and genesis of most of these is the impulse to air grievances. Gripes, beefs, cavils and carpings envenom the prose of leaflets, pamphlets, flyers, tracts and broadsides published by a panoply of political extremists, religious fanatics, eccentrics, radicals and zealots of every stripe. It is a long tradition dating to the early days of the printing press, and which persists even in the era of e-mail, facebook, and twitter and, although the pages of many of these impassioned documents have become brittle with age, many are still dripping wet with vitriol or, at least, with the perspiration of fervid conviction.

Because of its raw attitude and subversive flavor, the collective family of tracts, pamphlets, and related texts has been characterized by some as "outsider" writing or literature brut. There is, of course, a certain measure of validity to this assertion. Nevertheless, Victor Hugo and Leon Bloy were pamphleteers. Jonathan Swift's Drapier's Letters and A Modest Proposal were originally circulated in pamphlet form, as were Thomas Paine's American Crisis and Common Sense. Any number of other significant literary figures, including Octave Mirbeau, Max Nordau, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound, Benjamin Peret, and Philippe Soupault resorted to the printed tract at one time or another, and used it as a launch pad for public tirades. Indeed, the humble yet potent tract or pamphlet format has assumed a range of variations and exhibits a breadth of subject matter almost as diverse as that displayed by its big brother, the book.

Often authored anonymously, tracts and pamphlets have frequently taken the form of satire in order to convey derisive messages. Sometimes all semblance of civility is ripped away to reveal a naked and unabashed core of blatantly scurrilous invective.

Pamphlets of a pragmatic nature, such as training manuals or instruction booklets for household appliances and appurtenances, share a simple utilitarianism with their didactic cousins the etiquette, courtship, garden, recipe, and hygiene handbooks. Still other straightforward variants are commercial and business brochures, institutional bulletins and official communiqués, and labor union flyers and handbills calling for justice for janitors or boycotts of grapes.



By the late 1800s, submarine telegraph pamphlets and suffrage tracts were all the rage. Fifty years later, airborne leaflets were routinely disseminated from aircraft for propaganda purposes. Today, despite the inroads of rival media, pamphlets and tracts still make the rounds of shopping malls, parking lots, and other public concourses, because of the need to reach the "man in the street."

As a conveyance for exchanging animadversions, as a platform for socioeconomic argument, as a substitute for soapbox or pulpit, as a megaphone through which to decry the wreckage and carnage of civilization, as a conduit for sermon, sanction, gospel or grimoire, ad hoc credo or instant ideology, the tract or pamphlet has no rival.

Representative of every shade and nuance of opinion, admonition, alert, announcement, oracle, proclamation, decree, denunciation, revelation, epiphany, panegyric and condemnatory blast is a host of categories, including:

Manners and Mores
• European Leaflets for Young Ladies (1861)
• Jonathon Club Roster, Bylaws, and House Rules (clubhouse rule book)

Public Health
• Diseases of Animals (Great Britain, 1922)
• Soil Sterilization
• Insect Pests
• Fluke or Liver Rot in Sheep
• Eelworm in Potatoes
• Destruction of Mites and Insects in Sacks
• Cannibalism and Feather Picking in Poultry
• Beet Eelworm
• World Status Map – delineates war zones and danger areas, traveler advisories and warnings, vaccination and Center for Disease Control reports, immunization mandates, quarantines for cholera, yellow fever, plague
• Miscellaneous leaflets advertising or warning against medical nostrums



Industrial
• Formaldehyde: Its Safe Use in Foundries
• Pig Fattening Houses
• Wall Construction – a typical how-to booklet
• A Brief History of the Clark Grave Vault Company charts the development of metal burial vaults. One might be surprised to learn that the use of burial vaults was begun in the U. S. only in the 1850s or 1860s. Use was initiated primarily to prevent grave robbing and theft of buried valuables. The founder of the company Hugh D. Clark, using air-seal diving bell technology, devised a metal vault to enclose a casket and prevent invasion by moisture or human invaders. Readers learn from this booklet that the "Custodian" is the company's flagship model.




Environmental
• Mediterranean Fruit Fly, published by the U. S. Department of Food and Agriculture, is accompanied by illustrations of thriving maggots and infested fruit; instructions on "How to Recognize the Mediterranean Fruit Fly and Cooperate with Quarantine laws"
• Gypsy Moth and Japanese Beetle – other insect pests
• Questions and Answers About Cryptosporidium
Eternal vigilance against pernicious contaminants and scathing contagions…


Political
• Women's Suffrage (U.S., circa 1900)
• Why Socialism Must Come (U.S., circa 1927) – a bullying, insistent polemic
• Savak: Iranian Assassins – an anti-Pahlavi leaflet




Games and Toys
• Collecting Meccano Dinky Toys: A Meccano Magazine Digest 1928 – 1940 compiled by Ronald Truin, printed and published by the Cranbourn Press, Ltd., London; Dinky Toys are manufactured by Meccano, Ltd., Liverpool, as are Hornby miniature railway sets; trains, boats, planes, automobiles, barnyard animals, station staff and passengers are among the scale models and accessories made by this firm; scaled-down replicas of the Queen Mary, of aircraft such as the De Havilland Leopard Moth, the Percival "Gull," a low wing monoplane, and a General "Monospar" being specific examples. Additional choices include a delightful little model of a Cierva "Autogiro" with revolving vanes, and Royal Tank Corps personnel along with battle tanks, motorcycles and delivery vans. As the richly illustrated catalog announces, "All boys are interested in warships, and Set No. 50 provides a set of ships of the British Navy ranging from battleships to submarines."



• Fun and Games of Long Ago, published by Chandler Press, Maynard, Massachusetts, 1988, is a facsimile reprint of the 1864 edition of The American Boy's Book of Sports and Games designed by White, Herrick, Wier, and Harvey, engraved by Orr, and published by Dick and Fitzgerald, New York. Hopscotch, shinny, ten pins and pole vaulting are among the juvenile recreations enumerated between its covers. Besides outdoor activities there are playroom games and arithmetical amusements and puzzles; recommended "evening amusements" include "How to Strike the Knuckles Without Hurting Them," "The Magnetized Cane" and "The Erratic Egg."



• Rules for Games on Carrom Game Boards, 37 pages, published by the Carrom Company, Ludington, Michigan, copyright 1898 and 1899, 1900 and 1901 details proper gamesmanship for such variations as Crokinole and Spinoza. The Carrom product was a game board so versatile that some two dozen different games could be played on it.




• American Youths' Bill of Rights, first printed in 1947 by the BB gun maker Daisy Manufacturing Company, Rogers, Arkansas. Millions of copies of this "poignant plea" for the right of minors to bear arms have been circulated.

Hobbies

• Bischoff's Expert Taxidermy of Burbank, California (established 1922); internal illustrations for this company catalog and price list feature game heads, fur rugs, elephant foot stools, zebra foot table lamps and ash trays made from hippo, rhino, and buffalo feet.



• DeJon's Taxidermy Studio promotional brochure, ca. 1984



• Gardening Under Artificial Light (1970), a 65 page Brooklyn Botanic Garden Plants & Gardens series publication which discusses such subjects as "the basement greenhouse," "plant propagation under fluorescent tubes," effective mulching and how to build a phytarium.

Aesthetic Theory

Rants of the Parisian surrealists packaged in pamphlet form include A Corpse, directed against author Anatole France on the occasion of his funeral in 1924 and containing an essay titled Gilded Mediocrity, which ran down the literary establishment; later, members of the surrealist inner circle published a pamphlet against Breton – also called A Corpse. Antonin Artaud was chief propagandist for the group, and was responsible for such items as Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities; Address to the Pope; Address to the Dalai Lama; Letter to the Buddhist Schools; Letter to Doctors in Charge of Lunatic Asylums, and was probably the architect of an open letter against Paul Claudel and to the "notables of the municipal government" protesting the erection of a monument to Rimbaud in 1927.


Astrological and the Occult
• Publications of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal




Conspiracy / Paranoia
• Beware the Trilaterals
• The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye by Robert Keith Spenser, published by Monte Cristo Press, 1964, USA, outlines the threat of a "universal theocratic state" engineered by persons indoctrinated in the "secret course of instruction at the Arcane School"; traces occult symbolism in the design of the United Nations meditation room, the Temple of Understanding in the U. S. capitol, and the nefarious influence of the "cult of the All-Seeing Eye"; much mumbo-jumbo about "Kunalini, the Sephiroth, or Emanations, the Tetragrammaton, etc…."
• Adam Weishaupt: A Human Devil by Gerald B. Winrod; this booklet maintains that "the impact of Weishaupt's evil genius is still being felt the world around, even down to the present hour." According to Winrod, Weishaupt created the sect of the Illuminati, a subversive secret society whose "plot has been carried on with secrecy and diabolical cunning" while "the diseased brain of this wicked personage" took control of European masonry in a bid to "bend it to his will and use it as an instrument for carrying out his conspiracy against God, Christ, the Church and civilization." They also were given to the use of "strange poisons and weird medicines." "From documents which fell into the hands of the German government it has been discovered that his organization possessed dreadful poisons and had no hesitation about using them when to do so might serve to silence an enemy or advance their cause in other ways. They had a powder which produced blindness, a prescription of a poison which had an insidiously slow but deadly effect, the formula for another poison which 'devoured everything' when sprayed into the face, etc. They also possess a strange substance called Luisenwasser (Louise Water) because it was secretly given to Louise, the Crown Princess of Saxony to further the romance with Toselli and thereby detract from the reputation of the ruling dynasty." As we read on, we learn, to our horror, that Weishaupt's beliefs are the impetus behind fascism, communism, the Jacobins, Jesuits, and Jews…



• A History of Freemasonry: The Story of its Relations with Satan and the Popes by Joseph McCabe, 31 pages, published 1949 by Haldeman-Julius Publications, Girard, Kansas, concerning the "rebuke to convivial society" comprised by "…the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders, which professes to combine the wisdom of the world from the beginning of time with the most perfect blend of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man…"
• Freemasonry: A Way of Life, published by The Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of California, San Francisco
• 12 Questions on Freemasonry
Q. "What are the principal teachings of Freemasonry?" A. "Brotherly love, relief and truth."
• The Great Swine Flu Caper of 1976, published by the Lord's Covenant Church, Phoenix, Arizona
• The New Fugitive Pope, published by the Music Square Church, Van Buren, Arkansas
• Swine's Flesh as Food, reprinted from Mount Zion Reporter




Civil Defense
• Home Blast Shelter
• Belowground Home Fallout Shelter
• Aboveground Home Fallout Shelter
• Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack, 46 pages, published by Department of Defense Office of Civil Defense, 1961.

FEMA (the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency) has published a variety of handy pamphlets to ensure preparedness of the populace in the event of nuclear attack: how-to handbooks for the construction of belowground and aboveground home fallout shelters, detailing such matters as excavation, waterproofing and hatch integrity. If a home blast shelter is more to a family's taste, FEMA obligingly offers a pamphlet for that, too; this informative publication cautions that "if the attack does not occur by the time the shelter has been occupied for about 2 hours, the ventilation system should be operated for about 15 minutes to provide fresh air in the shelter. The ventilation system should then be closed again and this cycle repeated until either the blast wave has passed over the shelter (detected by a shaking movement) or the danger of the attack has ended." Similarly, the Department of Defense Office of Civil Defense offered for a price of 10 cents, a pamphlet first published by the Superintendent of Documents of the U.S. Government Printing Office in June, 1959, containing messages about the "enemy" along with technical blueprints and detailed construction plans; yet another pamphlet – Fallout Protection, published in 1961 – discusses such matters as Geiger counters and "emergency housekeeping" and defines terms such as "kiloton," "megaton," "roentgen," and "fireball," "blast wave," and "blast wind."



Manifestos
• The Cry for Justice (1921) by Upton Sinclair
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 8 pages, "adopted and proclaimed" on December 10, 1948 and published by the United Nations Department of Public Information; reads like a pretentious rehash of two foundational documents of the United States: the U. S. constitution and the Declaration of Independence.



Social Meliorism
• What Every Woman Should Know - the classic of birth control by Margaret Higgins Sanger
• Nudism - American Sunbathing Association's 9 page promotional pamphlet containing general information – a history of public nudism in America along with a map detailing two hundred regional chapters in North America and Hawaii (nudist camps). "Naturism," as it was formerly called, was started in America in 1929 by German immigrant Kurt Barthel who formed "The American League for Physical Culture" and whose outings early on were the target of raids by law officers; motto = "clothed when practical, unclothed when possible."
• Bureaucrat, Kill Thyself! by Archibald Canby Higgins, published 1957 by Faith and Renewal Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan; here the servants or masters trope is given a new twist by insisting that the only honorable course for useless government employees who purport to serve the interests of the electorate is to immolate themselves on the pyre of self-extinction; by eliminating themselves and the burden of their parasitic existences as a function of an overbearing and unwieldy government, they will thereby relieve the body politic of a persistent burden of supporting individuals who would otherwise be unemployable, serving the highest public good in the process, and performing the highest duty to the citizenry whose interests their "entire parasitic tribe claims to serve"; lots of memorable verbiage such as "minor officials and petty authoritarians whose effects can be reduced to the equation: tiny brain + shiny badge = big, big trouble."



• The Abolition of Work by Bob Black, published by Feh! Press, New York, 1993; in which the author contends that there should not be industry or labor but that, as with play, all human activity should involve a "ludic" element making it "pleasurable, enjoyable, as is recreation"; originally published in pamphlet form in 1985 and subsequently translated into several languages, it is breathtaking in its scholarship. Advocating not more leisure but more fun, author Black offers such wisdom as: "Workers of the world…relax!"; "Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working." "Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such moronizing mechanisms as television and education." "People are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias." Workers, Black asserts, are nothing but "stultified submissives."



Civics / Public Information
• Juror's Handbook
• The Death Penalty: Cruel and Inhuman Punishment, a brochure published by Amnesty International, New York, New York, 7 pages, ca. 1988.
• How to Avoid Ponzi and Pyramid Schemes, 12 pages, a U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission "consumer education" pamphlet for investors published in Washington, D. C., ca. 1977.
• Censorship Causes Blindness, published by Bantam Doubleday Dell.

Science and Pseudoscience
• The Brain Scale of Dr. Brunler by Arthur M. Young, a 16 page pamphlet published by Robert Briggs Associates, San Francisco; its author was the designer and developer of the Bell helicopter and founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California; Brunler had an instrument with a radiesthesia pendulum and a long mahogany box five inches square and four feet long with a diamond-shaped insert at the end which he used to gauge the brain power of a subject who sat for the test wearing a headpiece from which "a silk cord led to a slider adapted for motion along the scale."
• Perpetual Motion
• There Will Never Be a Cure for Aids
• Rogaine: The Only Product Ever Proven to Grow Hair




• Your Personality Revealed is a questionnaire circulated by the Church of Scientology, the pseudoreligion fabricated by d-grade science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard during the 1950s; teeming with rinky-dink pretensions to psychological insight. Hubbard chides the scientologist not to use "squirrel meters or home-built meters" (in reference to the Scientology "e-meter"), but to buy only his approved official model made to his exacting specifications. These "electropsychometric" clown tests are pure brain bilkers, close relatives to P. T. Barnum sideshow attractions; excerpts from these publications: "Dianetics: from the Greek dia (thought) and nous (soul), thus: "through the soul"; a system for the analysis, control and development of human thought which also provides techniques for increased ability, rationality, and freedom from the discovered single source of aberrations and psychosomatic ills"; Dianetics is then declensioned "in Latin = scio (=knowing) and the Greek logos (study), scientology means "knowing how to know."



• E-Meter Essentials: Clearing Series: Volume One, 1961 by L. Ron Hubbard, Bridge Publications, Los Angeles, California; an instruction booklet for use of the "Hubbard Electrometer or E-meter" which, according to the Scientology Applied Religious Philosophy organization, is "a device which is sometimes used in Scientology. In itself, the E-meter does nothing." Resembling a military surplus voltmeter with two tin cans attached by insulated wire cables, a panel with knobs and dials and a fluctuating needle, the e-meter is employed in sessions conducted by an "auditor" in order to sense the presence of "Thetans," disembodied spirits or partially incorporeal corporealized spirits; it is a "pre-conscious meter" because it registers a datum before the user becomes conscious of it. This booklet abounds with hilariously dopey jargon such as "Pre-Havingness stage," "engrams," "release," and "clear," and warns sternly against being inhibited by "suspected withholds." The instructions read like something written by precocious children aping scientific jargon they don't understand. "Theta bops" and "rock slams," for example, mean hidden evil intentions. The e-meter mocks the lie detector, and recalls vintage quack devices like the "biometer" with its modulated, colored lights. To quote the jacket blurb: "A startling and thorough coverage of the E-meter incorporating all modern developments and its use in Assessments, Security Checking and S. O. P. goals."
• Scientology: A History of Man; billed as a "cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years"
• Animal Magnetism
• Mesmerism
• Learn Hypnosis at Home
• The Baxter School of Lie Detection Polygraph Examiner Course published in San Diego, California; deals with calibration, chart analysis and examiner ethics

Countless pamphlets deal with speculative topics such as U.F.O.s, methods of behavioral analysis such as phrenology, and vitalist theories such as Wilhelm Reich's notion of "orgone." For those who can't get enough of pseudo-scientific gadgets, there are the confiscated specimens documented in the promotional flyer (circa 1972) for the FDA's National Museum of Medical Quackery at the St. Louis Science Museum.



Religious / Metaphysical
• Compendio de Oraciones a quaint book of 40 prayers published in Mexico.
• Life of Immanuel Swedenborg by Sig Synnestvedt, a publication of the Swedenborg Foundation, New York, New York; discusses the Swedish mystic's inventions, his contributions to biology, mineralogy, metallurgy, physics and cosmology, his clairvoyance and his dreams, revelations, visions as outlined in his Arcana Coelestia (Heavenly Secrets).
• Basic Facts of the Baha'i Faith, 5 pages: "This Faith originated in Persia in 1844. In that year a young Man Who Called Himself the Bab (or "Gate") began to teach that God would soon "make manifest" a World Teacher to unite men and women and usher in an age of world peace. The Bab attracted so many followers that the Persian government and the Islamic clergy wanted to kill Him, and they massacred more than twenty thousand of His followers. In 1863 Bahaullah announced to the remaining followers of the Bab that he was the chosen Manifestation of God for this age. He then proclaimed His Message in letters (known as "Tablets") to the leading monarchs, religious leaders and people of the world."
• The Lemurian Viewpoint, 13 pages, published by The Lemurian Fellowship, Ramona, California, 1984; described as "A School of Universal Philosophy established under the direction and guidance of the Lemurian Brotherhood, one of the original Mystery Schools of this human life wave," the purpose of the Fellowship espoused by this pamphlet is the dissemination of "The Great Work" conducted among humans by the "Great Ones," the greatest of whom was "The Great Being Melchizedek – ruler of Mu and the Mukulian Empire now submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean who brought his message 76,000 years ago to mankind"; adepts and initiates originated in 1936 in Chicago, then moved to Milwaukee and finally to California led by "the Ego best known as Dr. Robert D. Stelle, selected by the Great Ones of the Brotherhood as Direct Emissary to the human race."
• My Visit to Venus, a promotional flyer by T. Lobsang Rampa, published by Fate magazine, circa 1980 – "all royalty profits go to the Save a Cat League"
• A Modest Proof of the Order and Government settled by Christ and His Apostles in the Church by John Checkley.
• Puritan manifestoes
• The Guru-Disciple Relationship by Mrinalini Mata



Evangelical
• One Way!; This Was Your Life!; Somebody Goofed; A Demon's Nightmare; by Chick Publications / Emmanuel Assembly of God / Robert Percival Ministries; cartoon strips in which the Grim Reaper comes for a self-satisfied Everyman: "But God said unto him, thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee."




• Did God Create a Devil? Published by the Worldwide Church of God.
• Behind the Walls, published by Tony Alamo, World Pastor, Holy Alamo Christian Church, Alma, Arkansas: Behind the Walls boasts that "Alamo literature circulation is more than USA Today, the New York Times, L. A. Times and many other international publications combined." In bold headlines, Alamo tracts shout: "Cult Protection Racket"; "Government Subversion Against Alamo"; "Duped?"; and "Nailed!!!"
• Do You Have a Drop-Off Point for God? Published by the Concordia Tract Mission, St. Louis, Missouri.



Pacifism
• Ghandi Speaks, published by Self-Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, California
• From Military Service to Christian Nonresistance: The Testimony of a Former French Army Officer by Pierre Widmer, Nommay, France; published by the Mennonite Central Committee, Akron, Pennsylvania, October, 1949
• Christian Pacifism: A Personal Testimony by J. Stuart Innerst, sixth printing, revised 1965, La Jolla, California; 8 page leaflet
• The Dream Shattered Over Sixty Years Ago by Leo Tolstoy



Etiquette
• The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility by Emily Thornwell, New York, 1856; a "courtesy and conduct" book with chapters on The Art of Conversing with Fluency and Propriety and The Whole Art of Correct and Elegant Letter-Writing in which ladies learn that "much of the civility of fashionable life savors of deception"; "Beware of talking too much; if you do not talk to the purpose, the less you say the better; but even if you do, and if, withal, you are gifted with the best powers of conversation, it will be wise for you to guard against excessive loquacity"; and "avoid even the appearance of pedantry. If you are conversing with persons of very limited attainments, you will make yourself far more acceptable, as well as useful to them, by accommodating yourself to their capacities, than by compelling them to listen to what they cannot understand."



• How to Love and Be Loved (no publication data), anonymous, ca. 1900; contains advice to the lovelorn, and encouraging tips to all those bitten by the bug: How to Woo and How to Win; How to Begin a Courtship; Courting a Lively Girl; Courting a Domesticated Girl; Courting a Prudish Girl; Courting a Proud Girl; Courting a Shy Girl; Courting an Heiress; Courting a Blue Stocking; Courting an Old Maid; The Science of Kissing ("Don't grab and yank the lady as if she were a restive colt; don't muss her hair, scratch down her collar, bite her cheek, and leave her rumpled and mixed; Don't flavor your kiss with onions, tobacco, gin, cocktails, lager beer, or any other odorous delicacy"); then there are sections on "Love as a Disease" and " How to Kiss Sweetly": "The gentleman should be taller than the lady he intends to kiss. Take her right hand in yours, and draw her gently to you; pass your left hand over her right shoulder, diagonally down across her back, under her left arm; press her to your bosom. At the same time she will throw her head back, and you have nothing to do but to lean a little forward and press your lips to hers, and then the thing is done. Don't make a noise over it, as if you were shooting crackers, nor pounce down like a hungry hawk upon an innocent dove; but gently fold the damsel in your arms without smashing her standing collar, or spoiling her optics, and, by a sweet pressure upon the mouth, revel in the blissfulness of your situation, without smacking your lips, as you would after imbibing the Bacchanalian draught, but like sipping the honey from the lips of Aphrodite."



• The Art of Kissing by Hugh Morris, 1936; 45 pages; includes: "How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouth"; the "French 'Soul' Kiss"; the "'Vacuum' Kiss"; the "'Spiritual' Kiss"; and "Electric Kissing Parties." A veritable bible of osculation - "the exquisite, ineffable epitome of unalloyed bliss" - this indispensable primer offers explicit counseling: 'Then, with a series of little nips, bring your lips around from the nape of her neck to the curving swerve of her jaw, close to the ear. Gently kiss the lobe of her ear. But be sure to return to the tender softness of her jaw. From then on, the way should be clear to you. Nuzzle your lips along the soft, downy expanse until you reach the corner of her lips. You will know when this happens because, suddenly, you will feel a strange stiffening of her shoulders under your arm. Kiss her! Kiss her as though, at that moment, nothing else exists in the world. Kiss her as though your entire life is wrapped up into the period of the kiss. Kiss her!"




Souvenir Booklets and Travel Brochures
• The Deathless Story of the Titanic; a commemorative booklet listing the passenger manifest of the ill-fated White Star liner, a list of survivors, a list of those who perished, and a narrative of the great maritime tragedy.




• A Complete Bullfight with Colored Pictures, published by Aboitz Press, Mexico City, 1953; a bilingual Spanish – English souvenir booklet explaining a toreador's moves and maneuvers, such as the "Veronica," the "Half Veronica" and "The Telephone," a maneuver in which the matador has so dominated the bull that he is able to rest his elbow on the bull's head while resting his own head in his hand; if the toreador stands with his feet spread while executing a veronica or other pass, it is called "with the open compass"; also contains interesting tidbits of information, such as the fact that the traditional hour for a bullfight is five in the afternoon and corridas (bull fight rings) are built so that, at that fateful hour, half the arena will be in the sun, the other half in the shade.
• Boot Hill Graveyard, a souvenir booklet from Tombstone, Arizona
• Folsom Prison
• Thai tourism brochures
• Iraq – Land of Contrasts



History
• Thumbscrew and Rack by Geo. E. Macdonald; a history of torture during the Inquisition featuring instruments for the annihilation of heretics from the Nuremberg Collection; published by the American Atheist Press in Austin, Texas; with gory observations by Robert Ingersoll.



• Anchors - a nautical title (number 110) in the lavishly illustrated Shire Album series, whose companion volumes treat such topics as thimbles, lost trade routes, laundry bygones, dairying bygones, scales and balances, old garden tools, writing antiques, street furniture.
• Fronde pamphlets – French Revolution
• Labor pamphlets – trade unions

A circular issued in April 1847 by the headquarters of General Antonio Lopez de Santa-Anna offered bribes and rewards to any American soldier who would desert during the Mexican War: KNOW ALL MEN: That Antonio Lopez de Santa-Anna, President of the United States of Mexico and Commander in chief of the Mexican armies has been duly authorized to make the following concessions to all and every one of the persons now in the American army who will present themselves before me or any of the commanding officers of the Mexican forces, viz:, etc.




In a space of but twenty years, the religious tract, the polemical pamphlet, the broadside manifesto, and their humble cousins, the handbill, flyer, and circular, have been eclipsed by the brighter baubles of the Electronic Age. Ideal vehicles for the conspiratorial whisper and the barbaric yawp alike, these time-honored, ink-and-paper instruments of public communication have been relegated to the status of quaint and dusty relics…