Pamphlets are important sources for the history of contemporary views on subjects touching upon law and society. Their often colourful titles and the sometimes very inventive pseudonyms of their authors point to the urgency of the matters at stake. Pamphleteers show their vision or opposition to the views of others. Both governments and individuals used and use pamphlets as a medium. Following a definition created by the UNESCO a pamphlet is a printed publication with upto 48 pages, but sometimes the length is much greater. Judging by their form one can look at ordinances and government announcements as a form of pamphlets. During the last decades a number of pamphlet collections has been digitized separatedly. This page gives an overview organized by country in alphabetical order. Some collections contain other materials as well. Whenever possible a further chronological order has been applied. This overview is surely not complete or exhaustive. Any information about more digitized collections with pamphlets concerning law and justice is welcome. Apart from pamphlets I include here also one-leaf publications such as broadsides, Einblattdrucke and plano’s.

Many digital libraries contain pamphlets, too. Digitized pamphlets can be found also using large international portals such as Europeana and the Digital Library of America. The former portal European History Primary Sources (EUI, Florence), too, led you to a number of collections with pamphlets. JSTOR Collections, too contains a number of pamphlet collections in open access. Generally subscribers-only collections have been excluded here, with some clearly indicated exceptions when you can search and browse such collections. On the other hand, there is special attention for related genres such as festival books, broadside ballads and chapbooks, cheaply printed popular literature showing bias and opinion on many matters.

A number of collections with digitized pamphlets from the First World War can be found at my blog Digital1418. The main independent pamphlet collections concerning the period 1914-1918 and the collections listed here are also accessible and better searchable with tags in an overview at Zotero. The version at Zotero contains more than shown in the various lists here below.

World

• International Digital Ephemera Project, University of California at Los Angeles – a portal to currently fifteen digital collections, among them also collections with pamphlets

Europe

Festival books is the generic term for occasional publications, often no longer than a pamphlet, published around the crowning of kings, the Joyous Entries into cities, marriages and funerals. These works convey representations of power and images of justice and law. They are a source for legal iconography because they are often wonderfully illustrated.

• Early Modern Festival Books, Oxford University – a repertory for five libraries and a digital library based on and expanded from the study Festivals and Ceremonies. A Bibliography of Works Relating to Court, Civic and Religious Festivals in Europe 1500-1800 by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Anne Simon (London 2000) with 3,000 books in twelve languages
• Renaissance Festival Books, British Library and University of Warwick – some 250 of the 2,000 books at the BL documenting festivals and ceremonies in Europe between 1475 and 1700
• Festival books, The Warburg Institute, University of London – 102 digitized works
• Festival books, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute – with some 1,300 digitized works
• Festkultur Online, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel – 314 digitized works and much background information; thematic research in and for illustrations with Iconclass
• Celebrating Italian Festivals, Beinecke Library, Yale University – 231 digitized Early Modern works
• Livres de fête de la Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, collections Jacques Doucet (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles), Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris – an online catalogue for some 1,000 festival books, a small number of them has been digitized

Some collections have different European dimensions:

• Die Fuggerzeitungen: Ein frühneuzeitliches Informationsmedium und seine Erschließung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and Universität Wien – a project around the nearly 40,000 newsletters sent by the Fugger banking family between 1568 and 1605; interface German and English
• Poor Sinners’ Pamphlets, College of Arts & Letters, Michigan State University – a project with 101 pamphlets from France, Germany and the United Kingdom concerning the executions of criminals, to be compared with Harvard’s collection Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders

Latin America

• Latin American Pamphlets Digital Collection, Widener Library, Harvard University
• Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera, Princeton University- a growing collection with many thousands pamphlets and posters
• Spanish America Collection: Broadsides, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University – some 730 broadsides within this collection at the Internet Archive
• Central American Broadsides, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS – some 600 broadsides from the period 1820-1992, mainly from Guatemala, but also from other Latin American countries
• Latin American Political Campaign Ephemera Collection, University of California at San Diego Library – some 700 posters, pamphlets and broadsides
• Twentieth Century Latin American Pamphlets, Rutgers University Libraries – not a digital collection, but worth mentioning as an online catalogue, with items from Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay

Argentina

• Argentine Political Ephemera Collection, 1930-1974, University of Massachusetts, Amherst – fifty items
• Biblioteca criolla, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin – some 1,500 chapbooks published between the 1850s and 1990

Australia

• Federation Pamphlets, University of Adelaide Library

Austria

• Einblattdrucke, ÖNB Digital, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna – some 4,000 works, and also currenly some sixty digitized Flugschriften
• Archiv 1848, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek – publications around the revolutionary events in 1848
• Flugschriften zur Revolution 1848, Wienbibliothek – some 5,000 digitized pamphlets
• Wienbibliothek Digital: Flugschriften – nearly 280 digitized eighteenth-century pamphlets from and about Vienna
• Einblattdrucke, Universitätsbibliothek Graz

Belgium

• Sammlung Alff, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek, Cologne – some 600 pamphlets on the revolutions in Brabant and Liège around 1800 (1781-1825)

Bolivia

• Bolivian Digital Pamphlets Collection, Cornell University – 715 pamphlets from the collection assembled by Alfredo Montalvo

Brasil

• Brazil Cordel Literature Web Archive, Library of Congress – a digital collection of archives websites and blogs about literatura del cordel, pamphlets and chapbooks
• Literatura cordel em verso – a site about the collection of 9,000 folhetos de cordel at the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro
• Biblioteca Virtual Cordel, Université de Poitiers – 171 digitized Brazilian works in the cordel genre

Canada

• Canadian Pamphlets and Broadsides, University of Toronto Library – also accessible at the Internet Archive (nearly 2,100 items)
• Canadian Pamphlet Collection, Queen’s University, Kingston – some 3,300 items
• Posters and Broadsides in Canada, Collections Canada – posters and pamphlets, also from government sources

Chili

• Colecciones de historia política: Folletos, Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional – 2,800 pamphlets from the nineteenth and twentieth century

China

• Chinese Pamphlets, Center for Research Libraries – pamphlets from China and Hongkong published between 1947 and 1954

Colombia

• The J. Léon Helguera Collection of Colombiana, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee – mainly pamphlets and broadsides, some of them pertaining to law and government
• Folletos, Patrimonio Documental, Repositiorio Institucional, Universidad EAFIT, Medellin – 320 pamphlets

Cuba

• Cuban books and pamphlets, Digital Library of the Caribbean

Denmark

• Alle tiders tryk: Småtrykssamlingen in 100 år, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen – a virtual exhibition about 100 years Danish pamphlets and ephemera; there is now a digital collection with some 1,800 items and also a selection

Estonia

• 17. sajandi (kund 1710) trükised Ajaloarhivi fondides, Ravhusarhiiv, Tartu – 1,100 digitized ordinances from the seventeenth century; interface Estonian and German

France

• French Revolution Pamphlets, Emory University, Atlanta, GA – a small sample (90 items) from a collection of 3,000 pamphlets with much additional information; most pamphlets are given in transcription
• French Revolutionary Pamphlets, 1788-1799, The University of Alabama Libraries – 300 digitized pamphlets
• French Revolutionary Pamphlets, Ball State University, Muncie, IN – some 500 pamphlets
• Revealing La Révolution, University of Maryland – with quick access at the Internet Archive to some 850 items from a collection with 12,000 pamphlets
• Reading and Revolutions in France (1789-1815), European Proclamations and Broadsides, John Rylands Library, Manchester – some 200 digitized ordinances, proclamations and broadsides
• Napoleon Collection, McGill University, Montreal – in this digital collection some 400 ephemeral prints eventually will be included
• French pamphlets, Newberry Library, Chicago and Internet Archive – more than 38,000 French items are now available online; the Newberry has created an accompanying website; you can search the pamphlets also with Philologic4
• French Political Pamphlets, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT – some 2,300 pamphlets from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with an annotated catalogue
• Recherches internationales sur les mazarinades – a website on the mazarinades, pamphlets against and in favor of cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661), including links to digitized pamphlets – the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris offers a bibliographical database including an advanced search mode
• Pamphlets.fr: Le répertoire des grand pamphlets – here in particular pamphlets by famous French people from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Pamphlets and Periodicals from the French Revolution of 1848, University of Chicago – some 120 digitized pamphlets
• French political ephemera, 1848-1852, University of Warwick – 24 pamphlets
• The Siege and Commune of Paris 1870-1871, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL – pamphlets, newspapers and other documents
• The May events archive / événements de mai 1968, Simon Fraser University – digitized booklets, leaflets, pamphlets, magazines and newspapers
• Journal électronique de la commune étudiante – a project around the 1968 student revolt, with a finding aid for ephemeral publications, often with digitized items

Currently a NEH-project runs for an overview of digitized French pamphlets with a project website hosted by the University of Florida Libraries, with also quick access to digitized items. You can consult for this library online the summary catalogue by Laura Monti (Gainesville, FL, 1971) and in a database for 2,800 pamphlets.

Germany

• Flugschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts – Brill – a licensed digital collection with some 10,000 pamphlets from the sixteenth-century; browsing and searching is free
• Einblattdrucke der Frühen Neuzeit, Digital Collections, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich – some 6,000 digitized Early Modern broadsides and pamphlets, with a scholarly bibliography (PDF, 2003)
• Digitalisierte Sammlungen der SBB: Einblattmaterialien, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz – 4,500 Einblattdrucke from the late fifteenth century onwards
• SBB16: Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts in der Staatsbiblothek Berlin – you can search here easily for digitized Flugschriften (around 540 works) and also for pamphlets around the Reformation (around 360 works)
• Frühneuzeitliche Gattungen: Flugblatt, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel – a selection of baroque illustrated pamphlets
• Collectio Erhard, Digitale Sammlungen, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster – 720 items, most of them Flugschriften and some 200 early editions of Luther’s works
• Einblattdrucksammlung Gustav Freytag, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main – 370 broadsides
• 1848 – Flugschriften im Netz, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main – nearly 1,700 pamphlets
• Flugschriften der Sammlung Friedländer zur Revolution 1848, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, Berlin – Friedlander collected also documents from the period before and after the 1848 events; since 1945 the original collection with 3,500 pamphlets is kept at the university library of Lodz
• Sammlung 1848, Zentral- und Landesbibliothek, Berlin – proclamations, ordinances, pamphlets, prints, newspapers, poems, and much more
• Flugschriften und Flugblätter 1848, Universitätstbibliothek, Humboldt-Universität Berlin – some 1,000 pamphlets and leaflets
• Einblattdrucke, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg – more than 600 broadsides
• Flugschriften aus der Bibliothek Oettingen-Wallenstein, Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg – some 1,000 17th century pamphlets
• Sammlung Flugblätter und Flugschriften, Archiv der sozialen Demokratie, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn – resources on the German social-democratic movement, and pamphlets from the former DDR
• Gelegenheitsschriften, Digitale Bibliothek Erfurt-Gotha – some 1,500 pamphlets; the advanced search mode enables you to filter for specific genres (Gattung)
• Einblattsammlung, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Darmstadt – some 1,100 Early Modern broadsides, currently without any meta-data or descriptive information
• Flugblattsammlung 16.-19. Jahrhundert, Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt – Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) – nearly 1,200 digitized Early Modern German broadsides

For the bibliographical projects VD17 and VD18 many pamphlets have been digitized. The 800 Lutherflugschriften at Eisenach, digitized by the Thüringische Staats- und Landesbibliothek Jena, are also avalable in the Reformationsportal and in VD16. The Katalog der Wolfenbütteler Lutherdrucke 1513 bis 1546, Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, is the tool for searching and finding early editions of Luther’s works.

For the Repertorium der Policeyordnungen der Frühen Neuzeit, a project started by the late Michael Stolleis, exists a database for searching Early Modern ordinances issued in the Holy Roman Empire.

Haiti

• A Colony in Crisis: The Saint-Domingue Grain Shortage of 1789, University of Maryland, College Park, MD – with both the French texts and English translations of pamphlets

Ireland

• 19th Century Pamphlet Collection, Digital Library, University College Dublin – 50 pamphlets on a wide spectrum of subjects
• 19th Century Social History Pamphlet Collection, Digital Library, University College Dublin – 92 pamphlets

Italy

• La Repubblica Romana del 1849 – pamphlets are included among the documents in this digital collection
• Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection, Duke University, Durham, NC – an online exhibit with some examples from this vast Italian collection with 50,000 pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects
• Italian Pamphlets, Fordham University Libraries, New York – Internet Archive – some 900 pamphlets, mainly around the period of Italy’s unification (1815-1871)
• Volantini, Toscana Novecento – some 1,200 pamphlets from the twentieth century kept at the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Toscana, Florence
• Manifesti, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Florence – some ninety mainly political pamphlets from the twentieth century
• Manifesti Politici, Fondazione Gramsci Emilia-Romagna, Bologna – thousands of digitized twentieth-century political pamphlets and posters; interface Italian and English
• Manifesti e vogli folanti, Collezioni digitali, Biblioteca Franco Serantini, Pisa – the digital collections of this library contain nearly 1,300 pamphlets and posters from the Italian unity onwards
• Garibaldi / Risorgimento Digital Archive, Brown University – a rich digital collection with also some 200 pamphlets from the nineteenth century
• Italian Religious Broadsides: Devotion, Marketing, Art and Typography in 17th-century Italy, The Newberry Library, Chicago – 180 broadsides

A number of projects concerns Italian bandi, ordinances, sometimes printed both as broadsides and pamphlets:

• Vox Venetica: Bandi della Repubblica Venezia di secoli 16-17, Venice, Fondazione Querini Stampalia – already nearly 3,300 digitized legal proclamations
• Editti e bandi pontifici, Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense – (printed) papal documents concerning the inquisition, 16th-18th century; using the Casanatense’s Scaffali Digitali one finds also a number of digitized old journals and books
• Bandi e bolle pontificie del XVI secolo, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome – 1,000 papal edicts and bulls from the sixteenth century
• La Raccolta dei Bandi Merlani, Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio – many thousands municipal ordinances and decrees of the cardinal-legate for Bologna from 1601 to 1796
• Viterbo dal Sacco di Roma a Napoleone. Tre secoli della storia quotidiana attraverso i manifesti (1521-1814), Centro di Documentazione Diocesano, Viterbo – some 40 bandi, Early Modern ordinances issued in Viterbo
• Italian Jewish Community Regulations, Columbia University Libraries, New York – some 40 Early Modern ordinances from Italian cities
• Tridentina manifesta, Biblioteca Digitale Trentina, Biblioteca comunale di Trento – nearly 3,000 digitized ordinances, from the sixteenth century until 1850

Mexico

• Mexican Political Pamphlets, 1808-1832, University of Toronto – some 1,150 digitized pamphlets, with a bibliography about Mexican history and politics in this period
• Dupee Mexican History Collection Broadsides, Brown University – 200 broadsides published after the independence of Mexico (1821)
• José Guadalupe Posada Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin – some 130 satirical pamphlets and broadsides published in the early twentieth century
• Folleteria, Fondo Reservado, Biblioteca Virtual de Yucatán – when selecting the collection Folleteria you get access to some 2,600 digitized pamphlets
• Mexico: Photographs, Manuscripts and Imprints, Southern Methodist University, Dallas , TX – with some 190 broadsides
• Folleteria Mexicana, Biblioteca Digital, Biblioteca Central, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México – a part of the Fondo Antguo
• Mexican Broadsides, University of California at San Diego – 578 broadsides from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century
• 19th century poltiical pamphlets in Spanish, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA – some 320 Mexican pamphlets

Netherlands

• The Early Modern Pamphlets Online – Brill – digitized pamphlets from three collections: the Knuttel collection in the Dutch Royal Library, the Van Alphen collection at Groningen, and the Flugschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts, pamphlets from the German Holy Roman Empire, full access only for subscribing libraries, but you can browse and search; at least 400 pamphlets concern law (search with subject Law);
• Early European Books – Chadwyck – within the Netherlands one can freely access in this subscribing collection books from the Dutch Royal Library, including also pamphlets
• Early Dutch Books Online, Royal Library, The Hague – a collection with 10,000 books from the period 1780-1800; some pamphlets have been included, and a few hundred ordinances
• England and the Netherlands: The ties between two nations, The Memory of the Netherlands – in this digital collection with items from the Dutch Royal Library and the British Library many pamphlets are present
• Tulipomania, Wageningen University Library – a digital collection with in particular pamphlets concerning the first large scale speculation (“bubble”) in tulips during the first quarter of the seventeenth century
• Ursicula: Pamfletten, Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde and Bibliotheca Thysiana, Leiden – a nice selection of some forty pamphlets, many of them concern law or politics from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
• Sammlung Alff, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek, Cologne – some 600 pamphlets on the revolutions in Brabant and Liège around 1800 (1781-1825)
• Pamfletten rond de herinvoering van de bisschoppelijke hiërarchie in Nederland, 1853 – Katholiek Documentatiecentrum, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen – some 300 pamphlets concerning the return of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the Netherlands in 1853; search with subject term “Pamfletten’
• Pamphlets and offprints from the Multatuli Museum, Amsterdam, The Memory of the Netherlands – some 600 pamphlets by and on Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820-1887), himself a very productive author and pamphleteer
• Illegal pamphlets and brochures – NIOD, Amsterdam, The Memory of the Netherlands – some 1,200 pamphlets published illegally during the Second World War
• Broadsheet collection: government publications, maps, prints and occasional poetry, The Memory of the Netherlands – 2,600 broadsides (plano’s) from the collection of the Dutch Royal Library, many of them color prints
• Bibliotheca Thysiana: Pamphlets, Leiden University Library – a selection with some 240 digitized pamphlets from this seventeenth-century library
• Niederländische Flugschriften, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Münster – some 820 Early Modern pamphlets; interface German and English
• Fagel Collection, Trinity College Library, Dublin – currently a small selection from the 6,000 Early Modern pamphlets collected by membes of the Fagel family who were griffiers of the States General

New Zealand

• The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout, New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, Victoria University of Wellington – some 1.000 pamphlets published between 1850 and around 1900, with a catalogue

Philippines

• Folletos, Digital Library, Miguel de Benavides Library, University of Santo Tomas, Manila – a collection with some 200 pamphlets from the seventeenth to the twentieth century

Poland

• Digital Library of Polish and Poland-related News Pamphlets – pamphlets from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century

Russia and Soviet-Union

• Soviet Pamphlets, University of Texas at Austin – three thematic collections, around education, women and rural life; there are also 600 pamphlets in the Tobenkin Collection

Spain

• Folletos, Biblioteca Digital, Ateneo de Madrid – hundreds of digitized pamphlets, listed by author and by title
• Fullets, Biblioteca del Ateneu Barcelonès – Memoria Digital de Catalunya – nearly 1,250 pamphlets from 1850 until 1920
• Memoria Digital de Canarias – 2,600 digitized items, including also pamphlets
• Fons dels regnats dels Austria (1500-1680) , Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona – 164 fullets, pamphlets from Spain’s Habsburgian period – this collection and the following can also be shown on an interactive map at Crònica: Fullets històrics en el mapa, Memoria Digital de Catalunya
• Fons de la Guerra de Successió (1680-1750), Universitat Pompeu Fabra – some 420 pamphlets
• Fons dels regnats de Ferran VI, Carles III i IV (1750-1807), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona – 549 pamphlets of a predominantly juridical nature
• Guerra de la Independència (1808-1814), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona – 700 pamphlets documenting a period of change
• Fons dels regnats de Ferran VII i Isabel II (1814-1868), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona – 700 mainly juridical pamphlets
• Catalogo y biblioteca digital de relaciones de sucesos, Biblioteca Digital Siglo d’Oro – 2,200 digitized pamphlets from the period 1500-1750, a portal for several Spanish collections with 5,800 items in the catalogue
• Relaciones de sucesos, Biblioteca Universidad de Sevilla – a virtual exhibit with a catalogue leading you to some 1,020 digitized pamphlets from the late sixteenth century to the late eighteenth century
• Spanish Civil War Communist Ephemera Collection, University of California at San Diego Library – some 130 items (posters, broadsides and handbills)
• Indignados / 15M Movement Collection, Princeton University Library – some 400 pamphlets of the protest movement in Madrid around May 15, 2011

Switzerland

• Wickiana, Zentralbibliothek Zürich – 430 popular prints with (illustrated) news from the sixteenth century collected by Johann Jacob Wick
• Feuilles volantes, Universitätsbibliothek Bern and e-rara – a subset at the Swiss digital platform e-rara for digitized rare books with some 750 Early Modern pamphlets; multilingual interface
• Sachdokumentation, Schweizerisches Sozialarchiv – digital access to some 160,000 items with all kinds of grey literature, and some 1,2 million newspaper clippings
• Standreden, Deutsches Seminar and Zentrum für rechtsgeschichtliche Forschung, Universität Zürich – a project with some 140 sermons around the execution of criminals, mainly from the nineteenth century
• Fogli volanti Repubblica Elvetica, Biblioteca digitale Ticino – 340 pamphlets from the period 1798-1803 held at the Archivio di Stato, Bellinzona
• Fogli volanti Poesie d’occasione, Biblioteca digitale Ticino – some 260 pamphlets with poems

Turkey

• Osmani Risaleler Veri Tabini, Islam Arastirmalari Merkezi, Üsküdar – 2400 Ottoman pamphlets with treatises on various subjects

United Kingdom

• Thomason Tracts, British Library and JISC – a digital version of the 1977 microfilm version of some 20,000 pamphlets, books and other materials from the period 1640-1661, as a part of Historical Texts, a larger digital collecion only accessible online at subscribing institutions; the tracts are also part of the subscribers-only Early English Books Online, but you can conduct a text search in them using the EEBO version at Text Creating Partnership
• The Word on the Street, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh – some 1,800 items, in particular broadsides on Scottish events
• Jacobite prints and broadsides, National Library of Scotland – nearly 700 items, most of them with portraits, only a few pamphlets
• 17th-19th century British religious, political and legal pamphlets, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
• Fabian Tracts, London School of Economics Digital Library – not only the original pamphlets of the Fabian Society since 1884, but also modern treatises of the Young Fabians – 7,000 digitized pamphlets from the LSE are accessible at 19th Century British Pamphlets Online (subscription service)
• Broadsides – Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians, British Library – this educational portal contains among the digitized items some fifty broadsides; it is interesting to look also for themes such as crime, poverty, power and politics
• Victorian Women Writers Project, University of Indiana – this digital collection gives a very good idea of the wide variety of subjects and genres, including pamphlets, essays and manifestos
• Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the US and UK, 1815-1914, Harvard Law School Library – some 400 digitized trial pamphlets
• 18th Century British Political Pamphlets, Queen’s University, Kingston – some 2,200 pamphlets
• Warwickshire political ephemera, 1774-1835, University of Warwick – 160 pamphlets and other publications
• Jewish pamphlets, University College London – some 180 pamphlets from the Mocatta Library

The project 19th Century British Pamphlets Online gives access at subscribing libraries, and through JSTOR, to some 23,000 pamphlets. In 2023 these pamphlets became accessible in open access at JSTOR Collections.

Pamphlets circulated also in manuscripts, a subject at the heart of the project Manuscript pamphleteering in Early Stuart England (Universities of Bristol and Birmingham).

England and the French Wars of religion. 16th century pamphlets beld at York Minster is an interesting virtual exhibition with English and French pamphlets.

United States of America

• Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789, Library of Congress – two collections with 277 digitized broadsides
• The Federalist Papers, Founding Fathers Info – there is also another text-only version of these famous pamphlets at Congress.gov
• African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907, Library of Congress – some 350 pamphlets on many subjects
• Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921, Library of Congress – 167 pamphlets concerning the right to vote for women
• War Department/Department of the Army Pamphlets, Library of Congress – a collection of pamphlets published between 1944 and 1992, part of the LoC’s Military Legal resources
• Printed Ephemera: Three centuries of broadside and other printed ephemera, Library of Congress – more than 10,000 items
• Throwaway History: The Broadside in American Culture, Tennessee Virtual Archive
• Witness to the Early American Experience, New York University Libraries – early archival records and documents, including pamphlets and broadsides
• American Archives: Documents of the American Revolution, 1774-1776, Northern Illinois University Libraries – a searchable text-only version of the nine volumes edited by Peter Force (1837)
• Slaves and the Court, 1760-1840, Library of Congress, Law Division
• From Slavery to Freedom: The African-American Pamphlet Collection 1822-1909, Library of Congress – nearly 400 pamphlets
• Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection, Cornell University Library – here, too, many pamphlets
• James Birney Collection of Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD – nearly 1,800 digitized pamphlets, available at the Internet Archive
• Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library – Internet Archive – among the 9,700 digitized works are many pamphlets
• Anti-Slavery Pamphlets, 1725-1911, University of Massachusetts, Amherst – nearly eighty digitized pamphlets
• The Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr., Massachusetts Historical Society – not only newspapers but also pamphlets concerning the American revolution collected by a Boston shopkeeper
• Liberty and the American Revolution, Sid Lapidus Collection, Princeton University Library
• Broadsides and Ephemera, Duke University Libraries, Durham, NC
• Trial Pamphlets Collection, Cornell University Library – pamphlets from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century
• Cornell University Collection of Political Americana
• Pamphlets, Harvard College Library – one of the largest American collections
• Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides, Harvard Law School Library
• Lincoln Broadsides, Brown University Library – pamphlets, broadsides and posters concerning Lincoln
• Alcohol, Temperance & Prohibition, Brown University
• Historical Broadsides, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, GA – an online catalogue with some 2000 broadsides, partially digitized
• Broadsides, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC – some 940 pamphlets and posters
• Darlington Digital Library, University of Pittsburgh – with among the resources some 50 broadsides and pamphlets from the eighteenth and nineteenth century
• Studies in Scarlet: Marriage & Sexuality in the US and UK, 1815-1914, Harvard Law School Library – some 400 digitized trial pamphlets
• Broadsides, Boston Athenaeum – some 200 digitized items dating from the nineteenth and twentieth century of a collection with 6,500 items
• Civil War Broadsides and Ephemera, University of Vermont Libraries, Burlington, VT – 37 items
• Confederate Imprints, Duke University Libraries – nearly 2,400 rare imprints available through the Internet Archive, with many pamphlets and broadsides, and a substantial number of works touching upon law
• Confederate Imprints, Boston Athenaeum – some 4200 digitized items, not just books, but also maps, serials, broadsides and pamphlets, and Marjorie Lyle Crandall’s Confederate Imprints: A Check List Based Principally on the Collection of the Boston Athenæum (Boston, MA, 1955)
• Broadsides Verses Collection, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, MD – 130 broadsides published during the Civil War
• Sam Lanham Collection: Civil War Pamphlets, University of North Texas – 120 items
• Broadsides Collection, Library of Virginia – some 1,200 pamphlets from the eighteenth century onwards
• The South Carolina Pamphlet Collection, University Libraries, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC – pamphlets, sermons and almanacs from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries
• German-Language Broadsides in North America, 1730-1830, PennState University Library, University Park, PA – some 1,890 digitized broadsides in German, based on the research of Hermann Wellenreuther
• Peace Pamphlets, Elizabethtown College – some thirty pamphlets from 1775 tot the twentieth century
• Missionary Library Pamphlets, Columbia University Libraries – Internet Archive – some 4,800 pamphlets on a wide variety of subjects
• Broadside Collection, Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin – 560 broadsides
• Centralia Massacre Collection, University of Washington Libraries – a digital collection of pamphlets, leaflets and letters concerning the Industrial Workers of the World and the events in Centralia in 1919
• Debs Collection of Pamphlets, Indiana State University – some 2,200 pamphlets from the 19th and 20th century
• American Left Ephemera Collection, University of Pittsburgh Libraries – some 1,600 items from 1890 onwards
• 20th Century American Political Pamphlets, Wichita University, Fairmont, KS – 330 pamphlets
• Socialist and Communist Pamphlets, University of Houston Libraries – some 100 items
• Social movements, University of Hawaii at Manoa – some four thousand pamphlets
• Digital Paxton: Digital collection, critical edition and teaching platform, Historical Society of Pennsylvania and The Library Company of Philadelphia – a project with 69 digitized pamphlets, 17 broadsides and much more about the Paxton Massacre at Conestoga in 1763
• Printed Ephemera Collection, University of West Virginia – some 800 items
• Blockson Pamphlets, Temple University – nearly 300 items on Afro-American history
• Pamphlets and Textual Documents Collection, University of Washington – 1,000 items
• Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlets Collection, Syracuse University – 88 pamphlets and 53 broadsides from the nineteenth century

In the digital collection Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law (HeinOnline) you can access after registration among other things a digitized version of the series Slavery, Race and the American Legal System, 1700-1872: The Pamphlet Literature, edited by Paul Finkelman (16 vol., Clark, NJ, 2007).

Other collections and subjects

• South Sea Bubble Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School – a collection concerning the wave of speculation in colonial enterprises at the beginning of the eighteenth century
• The Great Mirror of Folly or Het groote toneel der dwaasheid (1720), Beinecke Library, Yale University – a digitized Dutch book about the 1720 speculation
• Anarchism Pamphlets in the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan and Hathi Trust Digital Library
• World communism in the 20th century, University of Alberta – Internet Archive – 600 items
• International Labour and Radical History Pamphlet Collection, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s – some 1900 digitized pamphlets, mainly published between 1920 and 1970, from several countries (Canada, China, Russia, USA and UK)

A number digital collection is solely or largely devoted to broadside ballads, ballads printed as broadsides, often with telling illustrations:

• Complaintes criminelles en France (1870-1940), Criminocorpus – some 300 French ballads between 1870 and 1940
• Chansons bretonnes sur imprimés populaires: Base de données de feuilles volantes, KAN – some 2,800 digitized songs in Breton, see also the website Follenn
• VD Lied: Das Verzeichnis der deutschsprachigen Liedflugschriften – 30,000 songs from Germany, Austria and Switzerland on some 14,000 digitized eighteenth-century broadsides
• Straatliederen [Street songs], Memory of the Netherlands – some 7,000 broadside ballads from the rich collection of the Meertens Institute for Dutch Ethnology
• Broadside Ballads Online, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford – some 30,000 British broadsides, now with Iconclass illustration search
• English Broadside Ballads Archive (EBBA), University of California at Santa Barbara – a portal to several digital collections, with some 8,000 digitized ballads
• Broadsides, Huntingon Library, San Marino, CA – some 500 digitized broadsides
• Kenneth S. Goldstein Broadsides, University of Mississipi Libraries – some 1,500 ballad broadsides from the United Kingdom and Ireland from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century
• Lubrano Collection of Braodside Ballads, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s – nearly 600 items form the United Kingdom printed in the nineteenth century
• Glasgow Broadsides Ballads, Glasgow University Library – some nineteenth-century ballads from the Murray Collection
• Welsh Ballads Website, Cardiff University – in connection with the project for Welsh Ballads Online, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; note also the rich links collection
• Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads, American Antiquarian Society – three hundred digitized ballads from the early nineteenth century
• Helen Hartness Flanders Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT and Internet Archive – some 450 digitized New England broadside ballads
• Beat Movement: Poetry and Broadsides, Utah State University

You can find some 900 digitized British ballads in the digital collections of Trinity College, Dublin.

There is a number of digital collections for chapbooks, another genre showing often popular perspectives on law and justice:

• Chapbooks, Ball State University, Muncie, IN – 175 American chapbooks
• Chapbook Collection, McGill University, Montreal – nearly 950 British and American chapbooks, also viewable in the Internet Archive
• Chapbooks, Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York / JSTOR – 91 chapbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries printed mostly in York
• Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes, ARTFL, University of Chicago and Mediathèque de Troyes – the approach through the Mediathèque was for a long time absent
• Scottish Chapbooks, University of Guelph – 560 chapbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• Chapbooks printed in Scotland, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh – 3,000 chapbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, organized by theme
• Street Literature about Napoleon’s Wars, National Library of Scotland – nearly eighty chapbooks
• Thomas Fisher Library Chapbook Collection, University of Toronto – 725 chapbooks, in particular from Scotland
• Burnsiana and Scottish Literature, Scottish Literature Digital Projects, University of South Carolina – 71 chapbooks with poems and songs by Robert Burns (1759-1796); see also the webpages of the Scottish Chapbooks Project
• Gothic Archive Chapbooks, Raynor Memorial Libraries, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI – a growing collection of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gothic novels
• Early American Chapbooks, Oberlin College Library – Internet Archive – 32 nineteenth-century books
• Dime Novel Collection, University of South Florida, Tampa – some 1,300 books
• Dime Novels: the second generation. Boy heroes in American dime novels, 1860-1910, Haverford College – 44 items and a virtual exhibit about the rise of dime novels
• Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls, Stanford Libraries – some 2,300 items from 1860 to 1972
• Nickels and Dimes from the collections of Johannsen and LeBlanc, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb – some 7,600 items from the periode 1851-1930
• Dime Novel and Popular Literature, Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University – a relatively small but well-organized collection with a virtual exhibit about dime novels, Paper for the People. Dime novels and early mass market publishing, including a bibliography and further links
• Nickel Weeklies, Bowling Green State University – some 1,350 digitized volumes
• Yellowbacks at Emory, Emory University – a virtual exhibit and a digital collection, see also the convenient collection with some 1,250 items in the Internet Archive
• Yellowbacks: Don’t judge these Victorian books by their covers, The Athenaeum, Philadelphia – a virtual exhibit with one hundred covers
• Yellowback Cover Art, Ellen Truxaw Bistline and Jonathan Grossman – a curated Flickr gallery with some 2,000 images of covers of yellowbacks from UCLA and Emory University
• Westminster Detective Library, McDaniel College, Westminster, MD – transcriptions of detective stories in American and Biritsh magazines before 1891
• Spanish Chapbooks, Cambridge University Library and British Library – 2,000 sueltos from Cambridge and 2,500 items from the BL, with wrongdoing as a central theme, see also a virtual exhibition and the project website of Alison Sinclair (Cambridge)
• Pliegos de Cordel, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel Cervantes – 144 digitized Spanish chapbooks
• Pliegos de cordel, Contexto, Colección digital, Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, Madrid – 280 digitized chapbooks
• Pliegos de cordel, Real Academia Española – Biblioteca Digital, Bibliotecas de la Comunidad de Madrid – 840 chapbooks from the nineteenth century; smaller collections for other centuries can be selected using Materias
• Cordelteca, Centro Nacional de Folclore e Cultura Popular, Rio de Janeiro – some 7,000 digitized folhetos de cordel
• Libretti popolari, Legato Vittorio Imbrani, Biblioteca Universitaria di Napoli – 25 chapbooks from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often in Napolitan dialect
• Boekenoogen Chapbooks, Leiden University Library – 514 Dutch chapbooks collected by Gerrit Jan Boekenoogen
• Lianhuanhua, Asia Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa – a collection of pocket-sized picture books published at Shanghai in the 1920
• Skillingtryck, Digitala Samlingar, Kansalliskirjasto (Finnish National Library) – 750 chapbooks

The Lilly Library, Indiana University, has created a special catalogue for 1,900 chapbooks. For the United Kingdom the project Price One Penny: A Database of Cheap Literature 1837-1860 (Marie Léger-St. jean) provides bibliographical information, and also some examples, in particular The Mysteries of the Inquisition. The National University of Ireland, Galway is home to the international project Cheap Ephemeral Print in Translation.