Orwell #5

The reason why the badness of contemporary pamphlets is somewhat surprising is that the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own. We live in a time when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known. For plugging the holes of history the pamphlet is the ideal form. Yet lively pamphlets are very few . . . A good writer with something he passionately wanted to say -- and the essence of pamphleteering is to have something you want to say now, to as many people as possible -- would hesitate to cast it in pamphlet form, because he would hardly know how to set about getting it published, and would be doubtful whether the people he wanted to reach would ever read it. . . . At present the most hopeful symptom is the appearance of the non-party Left Wing pamphlet, such as the Hurricane Books. If productions of this type were as sure of being noticed in the press as are novels or books of verse, something would have been done towards bringing the pamphlet back to the attention of its proper public, and the level of the whole genre might rise. When one considers how flexible a form the pamphlet is, and how badly some of the events of our time need documenting, this is a thing to be desired.

-- "Review of Pamphlet Literature," The New Statesman and Nation, 1943