Colportage

Originally a form of popular literature peddled by travelling salesmen. Itinerant colporteurs, selling a diverse range of books and printed matter from the same horse-drawn cart, in constant motion.

Mass produced texts, written for swift consumption. Fanciful, sensational narratives targeting a proletarian readership. Deliberately positioned in opposition to the realist novel, facilitating a recourse to the imagination.

It is amusing to imagine the complete literary traveling salesman of that age and those classes, the man who knew how to introduce ghost stories and tales of chivalry into the servants’ quarters in the cities and the peasants’ cottages in the villages. To a certain extent, he must have been able to become part of the stories he was selling. Not as the hero, of course, not the banished prince or the knight errant, but perhaps the ambiguous old man – warner or seducer? – who appears in many of these stories and who, in the first illustration shown here, is about to make himself scarce at the sight of the crucifix. — Walter Benjamin, “Chambermaids’ Romances of the Past Century” (1929)

Stories contained images that could be torn out, detached, removed, circulated.

By extension, a somewhat haphazard, unregulated distribution of printed material. A random, eclectic, apparently chaotic collection of images and objects?

‘Because colportage was cheap and easily consumed, almost anyone could afford to tear pages out and fashion captions. Through creative captioning and the loose circulation of the texts, colportage operated as a sort of vernacular text, cheap and democratic enough to permit the reader the autonomy to appropriate in their own manner.’ — Matthew Von Vogt, “Reading ‘the Whole of World History’: An Investigation into Benjamin and Colportage” (2016)

‘Where dialectical images involve a montage practice that involves the collision between events, the more free-flowing experience of colportage, in which events drift in and out of the room without warning, is less violent.’ — Matthew Von Vogt, “Reading ‘the Whole of World History’: An Investigation into Benjamin and Colportage” (2016)

The so-called “colportage phenomenon of space”, in the work of Walter Benjamin, reflects the flâneur’s experience of overlapping and superimposed events and histories in a given space, which is a key aspect of sociotechnical exploration.

• [?] Did realist literature arise partly as a reaction against colportage’s excesses? Or was the relation/antagonism more complicated? (mutual influence, blurred boundaries)
• [?] How did the interplay of word and image differ from that of other literary forms?
• [?] Are there other examples of itinerant, ephemeral print cultures?

• [?] Moving into the twentieth-century, did pulp magazines, comic books and other “lowbrow” genres take up the mantle of colportage? What are today’s analogues?

• [&] See also: hauntology?

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: Experimental publishing