Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Another writer who liked pamphlets

Ezra Pound, in his article “Terra Italica,” made a case for pamphlets.

The article is on religion, but the insights on pamphlets are better.

Pound said that people who think sometimes have new information and insights that crystallize in “chunks too long for magazine articles and too short for books.”

In the United States, these short books don’t make economic sense. In Italy, Eduardo Tinto published pamphlets for a lira, then worth about a nickel.

We Americans tend to pad the pamphlet into a book. The lucidity of 30 pages is lost in 450.

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