This edited volume provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the printed material often regarded as disposable by its contemporaries and, until recently, as unworthy of serious academic research. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, this volume not only demonstrates the wide variety of ephemeral publications which have survived to the present day, but also shows how they can be used to interpret history and printing history and culture in particular. Some of the forms of printed ephemera discussed will be familiar to scholars such as chapbooks and commercially-printed posters whilst others, such as papal indulgences and bellmans sheets are more unusual. The collection discusses the production, distribution and consumption of ephemera, including how it can be used demonstrate changes to print culture over time. This volume aims to demonstrate that printed ephemera, in its many and varied forms, is worthy of serious academic study.

Lisa Peters works in academic administration at the University of Chester, UK. She is the author of Politics, Publishing and Personalities: Wrexham Newspapers, 1848-1914 (2011), a contributor to the award-winning Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and the co-editor of Print, Politics and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain (2019). Elaine Jackson is an independent researcher, particularly interested in book history, bibliography and womens studies. She has contributed to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, theEncyclopaedia of British Womens Writing 1900-1950 (2005) and Book Trade Connections from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries (2008).