broadside

Broadside in its typographic sense is a compound of plain English: broad (wide) and side (face, surface), naming a large sheet of paper printed on one side only and intended for public posting or sale. The same word had, by the 16th century, also acquired its naval meaning — the broad side of a ship, and by extension the simultaneous discharge of all the guns on one side of a warship. The two meanings are not etymologically connected beyond the shared adjective, but they coexisted productively in the language of an era when England was both expanding its print trade and building the naval power that would make it an Atlantic empire. A broadside that destroyed reputations in the Strand and a broadside that destroyed ships in the Channel shared a name and a sense of overwhelming, concentrated assault.

The broadside ballad was the dominant form of popular print culture in England from the mid-16th through the 18th centuries. Printed on a single folio sheet, typically with a woodcut illustration at the top and the text of a popular song below (often with the instruction 'to be sung to the tune of' a well-known melody, saving the printer the expense of printing the music itself), broadsides were sold by hawkers in city streets for a penny or less. They reported murders, executions, military victories, royal births, natural disasters, and miraculous occurrences; they circulated popular songs, political satire, religious argument, and bawdy humor. A successful broadside could sell thousands of copies in a city the size of London and be pinned up in taverns, shops, and private houses across the country.

The broadside was the news medium of its era, but it was also something more than news — it was a form of collective emotional processing. When a particularly notorious criminal was hanged at Tyburn, broadside printers had their sheets ready to sell to the crowds who gathered for the spectacle, offering the condemned man's last words (often composed by the printer rather than the hanged man), a woodcut of the execution, and a moralizing ballad that allowed the audience to process what they had witnessed in a form simultaneously entertaining, edifying, and commercially satisfying. The Pepys Ballad Collection at Cambridge, assembled by Samuel Pepys himself, preserves over 1,800 broadsides from the 17th century — an archive of popular sensibility that no other source provides.

The broadside as a format survived into the 19th century, when cheap newspapers gradually displaced it as the primary vehicle for popular news and entertainment. Its direct descendants are visible in the poster, the flyer, and the handbill — all single-sheet printed items intended for immediate distribution to a public audience. In the 20th century, the broadside was revived by the poetry publishing movement as a format for limited-edition single-poem prints: small presses produced broadsides of poems by important poets in signed, hand-printed editions, making the format both a collectible art object and an echo of its democratic origins. In this second life the broadside moved from the cheapest form of print production to the most precious, a full reversal of its original social position.