“For plugging the holes in history the pamphlet is the ideal form.”
— George Orwell, ‘Pamphlet Literature’, January 9, 1943.
New Statesman and Nation George Orwell regretted the surprising “badness of contemporary pamphlets”. From a survey of his own library he identified nine main trends, ranging from “anti-Left and crypto-Fascist” to “lunatic”, and described them as “practically all trash, interesting only to bibliographies”.
This was surprising as “the pamphlet ought to be the literary form of an age like our own”, Orwell argued. A time “when political passions run high, channels of free expression are dwindling, and organised lying exists on a scale never before known”.