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A pamphlet is an unbound book (that is, without a hard cover or binding). Pamphlets 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 and saddle stapled or sewn at the crease to make a simple book.

In the "International Standardization of Statistics Relating to Book Production and Periodicals", UNESCO defines a pamphlet as "a non-periodical printed publication of 5 to 48 pages, excluding covers, published in a specific country and available to the public," while a book is "a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, excluding covers." These definitions are intended solely for UNESCO's book production statistics.^[1]

The word pamphlet for a small work (opuscule) issued by itself without covers came into Middle English c. 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.^[2][3] Pamphilus's name is derived from the Greek name Πάμφιλος, meaning "beloved of all".^[4] The poem was popular and widely copied and circulated on its own, forming a slim codex.

The earliest appearance of the word is in The Philobiblon (1344; ch. viii) of Richard de Bury, who speaks of "panfletos exiguos" {'little pamphlets'}.^[5]

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.^[3] In some European languages, this secondary connotation, of a disputatious tract, has come to the fore: compare libelle, from the Latin libellus, denoting a "little book".^[a]

During the seventeenth century, pamphlets were used as tools of propaganda and resistance, within religion and politics, for examples as instruments of resistance against the Catholic Church and the absolute monarchy. They were mostly created and used to protect the interests of the emerging religious and bourgeois classes.^[7]

Pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information and religious treatises. Pamphlets are very important in marketing because 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.

A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who produces or distributes pamphlets, especially for a political cause.

Pamphlets are prized by many book collectors and collectors of ephemera, particularly for the wide array of political and religious perspectives given voice by the format's ease of production. Substantial accumulations have been amassed and transferred to ownership of academic research libraries around the world: particularly comprehensive collections of American political pamphlets are housed at New York Public Library, the Tamiment Library of New York University, and the Jo Labadie collection at the University of Michigan.^[8]

The pamphlet has been widely adopted in commerce, particularly as a format for marketing communications.^[9] There are numerous purposes for pamphlets, such as product descriptions or instructions, corporate information, event promotions or tourism guides and they are often used in the same way as leaflets or brochures.

• Brochure
• Chapbook
• Flyer (pamphlet)
• Long-form journalism
• Publishing
• Zine

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pamphlets.

• Randy Silverman, 1987. "Small, Not Insignificant: a Specification for a Conservation Pamphlet Binding Structure", The Book and Paper Group Annual 6. Historical overview focusing on pamphlet binding.
• 19th Century British Pamphlets Online. Information about a project that digitised 26,000 19th century pamphlets from UK research libraries.
• 19th Century Pamphlet Collection. Collection of 19th-century pamphlets, predominantly of Irish interest and covering a broad spectrum of subjects. A UCD Digital Library Collection.
• 19th Century Social History Pamphlets Collection. Collection of pamphlets relating to 19th century Irish social history, particularly the themes of education, health, famine, poverty, business and communications. A UCD Digital Library Collection.