One form common to the different main traditions are simple one-sided large sheets for announcements posted on walls needing to be readable from a distance. These broadsheets range from official decrees, to wall newspapers and commercial posters. Flat when in use, if preserved, they would be either folded several times, or rolled up and kept in cylinders. Maps would be another such reason for this format, with the image needing a wide and continuous surface.

Early Soviet propaganda posters before the Stalinist period were often innovative, made use of limited material resources, and were designed according to standards set by avant-garde artists. This poster is a request for peasants and workers to submit objects of their achievements in agriculture, animal husbandry, beekeeping, or gardening for a 1927 exhibition in Pavelets village along the Ryazan-Ural railway.

Russian posters early 20th century, https://catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/99126764551606421

For further reading

Baburina, Nina. The Soviet political poster, 1917/1980: from the USSR Lenin Library collection. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985.

The surprising discovery around 1625 of this stele outside Xi’an showed Jesuits that Christianity had already been in China as early as 635. The Chinese and Syriac texts detail a history of the Church of the East, and was written in 781 during a time of Buddhist (and Christian) persecution. Reproductions, often using the Chinese rubbing technique, became popular, but the side inscriptions, with their many Syriac names, are often left out.

Gest Collection, T no. 81

For further reading

Fitzgerald, Devin. “A global experiment in printing: the circulation of the Nestorian Stele from Xi’an.” In The Routledge companion to global Renaissance art, edited by Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras, 177-189. New York: Routledge, 2024.

News of the 1911 Wuhan Uprising that would successfully topple the Chinese Qing imperial government was eagerly awaited in the Shanghai metropolis, and was conveyed there by telegraph. Multiple updates would be sent each day, and quick broadsheets would be made for sale and for posting on walls. This image, itself one issue of such a sheet, shows an image of how sheets like these were displayed on walls and read by the public.

Gift of Donald Roberts, Class of 1909, 1937

East Asian Library Special Collections, DS773.4. X58 1912

For further reading

Liang Jieling 梁潔玲 et al. (ed.) Road to China's 1911 Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Museum of History, 2011.

Benjamin Franklin became the official printer of Pennsylvania in 1730 (and of New Jersey in 1740), producing paper currency and proclamations such as this call to arms in response to the British declaration of war against France. Single-sheet, often oversize printed notices or advertisements are known as broadsides, and these would have been publicly posted or distributed to communicate information.

Gift of Sinclair Hamilton, Class of 1906

Graphic Arts, GA 2012.02794

For further reading

Miller, C. William. Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia printing, 1728-1766: a descriptive bibliography. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974.

This parchment scroll (here unrolled into a flat item) is a 10th-century will, written in Anglo-Saxon. It probably comes from the Abbey of St. Albans, to which it still belonged in the 12th century. Of an exceptional size, the will describes the distribution of the property of a wealthy woman: land rights, money, household goods, and enslaved locals. One specific enslaved person was also a priest, and was to inherit a church building.

Bequest of William H. Scheide ’36, 2015

Scheide 45.2

For further reading

Whitelock, Dorothy, with Neil Ker and Lord Bennell. The will of Æthelgifu. Oxford: The Roxburghe Club, 1968.

One proposed origin for printing has been stamped images of the Buddha, perhaps not unlike these 12th-century prints from the Jōruri temple in Kyōto prefecture, Japan. Bundles of such prints were discovered about 100 years ago in the back of a Buddha statue. Each sheet consists of 10 rows of 10 images of Amida Nyorai (Amithāba). They were made from whole woodblocks, and thus are printed shūbutsu rather than individually stamped inbutsu images.

East Asian Library Special Collections, NE1300.8.J3 M65e; item 7 (=Rudolph 2)

For further reading

McArthur, Meher. “Printed prayers: Japan’s first woodblock-printed Buddhas.” Buddhistdoor Global (October 17, 2014). Accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/printed-prayers-japans-first-woodblock-printed-buddhas/

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