Broadside

A broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only, historically used throughout Europe for purposes ranging from posters announcing public events to official proclamations, political commentary delivered in the form of printed ballads, and straightforward advertisements. A closely related tradition of large single sheet prints existed in Japan as well. Broadsides were among the most common and widely circulated forms of printed material from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, cheap to produce and intended to be read once and posted publicly or distributed on the street rather than kept and preserved, which makes surviving examples especially valuable to historians. The broadside declined through the middle of the nineteenth century as newspapers and inexpensive novels became widely available, offering a more frequent and more substantial alternative to the single printed sheet.