Items

• 'A Street Door of Our Own': A Short History of Life on an LCC Estate
  Organised by community worker Jim Cowan, this pamphlet describes life on the Honor Oak Estate in South London. Alongside photographs, twelve elderly residents reflect on estate life in the 1930s via transcribed interviews. The residents used press interest about the publication to ensure the council upheld their promise to build a community centre on the estate.
• 2 Flyers about the events of May 1968 in Paris (Autour De Gaulle and Les Jeunes Assument..)
  Printed amid the Paris student and worker uprisings of May 1968, these ephemeral flyers carry urgent calls for protest. Their rough printing captures the spontaneity and immediacy of revolutionary street literature.
• 3 Dinners for Beginners
  One of three leaflets from a series of guides produced by the Ministry of Food during and after the Second World War. The leaflets offered advice on healthy eating and nutrition, cooking for oneself, frugal approaches to meal preparation, and a wide range of information related to food supply and rationing. This leaflet provides three two‑course meals for novice cooks, with dishes including mince with boiled jacket potatoes and cabbage, and semolina pudding with jam. It also suggests a timed method to ensure each meal is on the table by 1 pm.
• A Broad Sheet
  Between 1902-1903, publisher Charles Elkin Mathews produced a monthly series entitled 'A Broad Sheet', in a single sheet, broadside format. On display is the first issue from January 1902. This sheet features poetry by Irish writers George Moore and W.B. Yeats, whose poem ‘Spinning Song’ was first printed here. The hand coloured illustrations were by Yeats’s younger brother, Jack, and Pamela Colman Smith, who most famously illustrated the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.
• A Salad a Day All the Year Round
  One of three leaflets from a series of guides produced by the Ministry of Food during and after the Second World War. The leaflets offered advice on healthy eating and nutrition, cooking for oneself, frugal approaches to meal preparation, and a wide range of information related to food supply and rationing. This leaflet provides salad recipes and suggests a wide range of vegetables, leaves, and fruits suitable for salads, including kohlrabi, young kale, and dandelion leaves. It also offers useful tips for cooks on preparing ingredients and adding flavour and colour with different leaves and vegetables.
• Africa, Europe, Caribbean: Political Commentaries
  Trinidad and Tobago’s Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) was led during the 1980s by George Weekes, who had been involved in Black Power activism. This pamphlet contains the text of talks given at an OWTU forum by Jeyifo Biodun, Darcus Howe, and Tim Hector. Internationalism and anticolonialism were at the heart of the talks, which were published as a pamphlet to reach a wider audience.
• Africa, Europe, Caribbean: Political Commentaries
  This flyer advertises the sale of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (Trinidad and Tobago) pamphlet 'Africa, Europe, Caribbean: Political Commentaries'. The pamphlet was available for sale directly from the Union in San Fernando, Trinidad, and also in London at New Beacon Books. Co-founded by John La Rose, New Beacon Books was the UK’s first Black publisher and bookshop, and is still running today.
• Black Power in Britain: A Special Statement
  Written and published by the newly founded Universal Coloured People’s Association, this pamphlet is an articulation of intentions, beginning with the words ‘Our Manifesto’. The manifesto aims to develop an international Black consciousness empowering identity and community self-determination. Examples of the often brutal experience of being Black in Britain, including restriction of access to work and housing, sit alongside plans for grassroots organising, including nurseries and study groups.
• Breaching the Peace : (A Collection of Radical Feminist Papers)
  Published by Onlywomen Press in 1983, 'Breaching the Peace' was a collection of papers by radical feminists that emerged from a workshop titled “The Women’s Liberation Movement versus The Women’s Peace Movement or How Dare You Presume I Went to Greenham.” The papers examined and criticised the women’s peace movement. The contributors argued that women-only camps, such as Greenham Common, presented a media‑friendly image of women’s liberation and that being female-only did not make them inherently feminist. The pamphlet format offered a quick and convenient way to disseminate and debate the discussions that arose from the workshop.
• Captain Blackbeard's Beef Creole: And Other Caribbean Recipes
  In 1977, and as part of the work of local community bookshop The Bookplace, the Peckham Publishing Project began with the aim to publish local writing. This pamphlet originated in the Bookplace’s English classes. The contributors discussed together ingredients and terminology and produced a Caribbean (mostly Jamaican) recipe book interspersed with related food information. The illustrations were provided by students from the local Collingwood Girls’ School.
• Catalogue no. 8: Old Books in Spanish and Other Languages Relating to Latin America
  Published in May 1942 by the Dolphin Book Company, this catalogue offered rare and second-hand books in Spanish and other languages on Latin America. Issued during wartime Oxford, it highlights Britain’s academic and cultural interest in the region’s history, literature, and politics.
• Communist Manifesto
  This is one of the most famous and reprinted pamphlets. Published in German in 1848, it has been translated into numerous languages with lasting political influence worldwide. Senate House Library’s collections include many editions of the manifesto, from the first English edition, rebound in leather covered boards for preservation, to more humble editions. The copy on display, with simple pink paper wrappers, lists one of the two famous authors as ‘Fred Engels’.
• Diary of a Divorce
  Manchester’s Commonword stemmed from an oral history project, beginning in 1977 as the Commonword Workshop. The groups developed to include one focussing on women’s writing. This pamphlet was written and illustrated by Wendy Whitfield, who also worked at Commonword. Designed to reflect a calendar, the pamphlet depicts the disintegration of a marriage from the woman’s point of view, against a backdrop of left-wing political activism.
• Divine: The Incomparably Insane Star of Pink Flamingos [...] With Accompanying Leaflet Queer Ephemera
  This poster, published by Camp Books in 2018 as part of the Queer Ephemera series, reproduces a Xerox flyer advertising drag icon Divine at Boston’s Pipeline nightclub on 12 March. The flyer exemplifies the DIY aesthetics of queer nightlife promotion, where photocopied posters circulated within underground club scenes. Both celebration and archive, it reflects the visibility, creativity, and resilience of LGBTQ+ communities and their cultural spaces in the late twentieth century.
• Do You Hate Children!!!
  In the 1960s and 1970s, the provision of low‑cost healthy meals and milk for British schoolchildren became politically charged following government cuts to education and welfare budgets. Do You Hate Children!!! is a single‑sheet typescript flyer that staunchly attacked the Conservative government’s plans to raise the price of school meals and abolish free school milk, highlighting the impact these measures would have on the health and education of working‑class children. The flyer was likely produced for the trade unions’ day of protest on 8 December 1970. The following day, protestors gathered in Downing Street to oppose the cuts proposed by the Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher.
• Ey Up Mi Duck: Images and Poetry From Derbyshire Miners Wives
  Created by the Derbyshire Women’s Action Group during the miners’ strike, this booklet combines poetry and images from miners’ wives. It highlights women’s voices in community struggle, capturing resilience, solidarity, and the social impact of industrial conflict in Derbyshire.
• Fascism and How to Defeat It
  In 1959, fascist Oswald Mosley stood for election in Kensington North. Communist Party of Great Britain member and 'Daily Worker' writer Kathleen Mary ‘Kay’ Beauchamp wrote this rapid response. Beauchamp informs a post-war generation about Mosley’s history of fascist organising and suggests means of countering it through communism. The pamphlet’s simple design of loose pages stapled together reflects the urgency of the situation.
• Feminist History in the East End: A Walk
  Published in 1979 by the feminist collective Rights of Women, 'Feminist History in the East End: A Walk' by Clare Manifold is both guidebook and manifesto. It maps a walking route through London’s East End, highlighting sites connected to women’s activism, labour struggles, and political organising. Blending history with lived geography, the booklet invited readers to encounter the city as a landscape of resistance and memory. Illustrated with photographs and portraits, it situates feminism within local histories of poverty, migration, and solidarity. More than a guide, it reflects late twentieth-century feminist efforts to reclaim women’s voices in public space.
• Fishpaste: Postcard Review of Art and Letters
  Printed on postcards (or postcard sized paper) which fitted in a table top Adana printing press, this ‘review of art and letters’ ran for two years on a monthly schedule. Printed at the Pandora Press by Rigby Graham, Toni Savage and Peter Hoy, each postcard contained a poem on one side and an illustration, usually by Rigby Graham, on the other. The title 'Fishpaste' was chosen as the contents of each issue were a surprise.
• Fun Amongst the Matches
  As advances in technology made colour printing less costly, advertising and promotional ephemera in the form of leaflets, pamphlets, and flyers became increasingly common. The British match manufacturer Bryant and May produced this pamphlet in various versions in the early 20th century, using the popular pastimes of parlour puzzles and tricks to promote their match products as props.
• Health Without Dairy Produce
  W. H. White was a doctor who advocated vegan diets from infancy, promoting his views through lectures, recipe books, and the maternity homes he managed. This 1938 pamphlet, prompted by the craze for “milk bars,” extols the benefits of a dairy‑free diet and includes various testimonials. White’s views were far from mainstream and milk in particular remained a staple of dietary recommendations.
• How Britain Was Fed in War Time: Food Control, 1939-1945
  Governments and institutions have long been prolific producers of spineless material: published acts, policy and research papers, reports, and leaflets offering information and advice. Such publications were an important means of spreading information and propaganda for the UK government during the Second World War. The Ministry of Food produced numerous pamphlets and leaflets related to food control and rationing. This particular pamphlet, published in 1946, provided an account of how food resources were mobilised during the war, including extensive statistical data and information that had been suppressed in the preceding five years.
• Invitation to a Social Gathering of the WSPU
  This flyer, issued by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), advertises the Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage of July 26th, 1913. Organised by constitutional suffragists under the leadership of Mrs. Henry Fawcett, the march brought women from across England and Wales to London, converging in Hyde Park for a mass demonstration. Unlike the militant tactics of the suffragettes, the NUWSS emphasised law-abiding, peaceful protest to prove widespread public support for women’s enfranchisement. The flyer calls for participation, hospitality, and crucially funds, embodying the collective effort and determination behind the campaign for political equality.
• Kitchen Weights and Measures
  One of three leaflets from a series of guides produced by the Ministry of Food during and after the Second World War. The leaflets offered advice on healthy eating and nutrition, cooking for oneself, frugal approaches to food preparation, and a wide range of information related to food supply and rationing. This leaflet provides invaluable guidance on weights and measures, giving both volume and ounce equivalents for a range of common ingredients.
• La Zapatera Prodigiosa
  Federico García Lorca’s play 'La Zapatera Prodigiosa' (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife) reflects the Spanish poet and dramatist’s flair for blending folklore, humour, and social commentary. This edition, with its striking illustrated cover, celebrates Lorca’s enduring influence on Spanish literature and theatre.