Stylogenyin the style of Onitsha Market Pamphlets

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Traditions & vernacular · 1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan Africa

Onitsha Market Pamphlets

Also known as Onitsha market literature, Nigerian chapbooks, Nigerian pulp pamphlets

Cheap, stapled pamphlets of romance, advice, drama and political biography, written by students, clerks, journalists and traders and printed by jobbing letterpress shops around Onitsha Main Market in eastern Nigeria from the late 1940s. Covers did the selling at the stall: long moralising titles in mixed jobbing type, the price and the author's pen-name, and recycled photographs on coloured card. The trade lost its presses in the Nigeria–Biafra War and revived only briefly afterwards.

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A sample layout drawn from the style’s design choices, until its AI image is made.

01

How it works

  • Put the whole pitch on the cover: a long, sensational or moralising title, a subtitle, the author's name or pen-name and the price.
  • Fill the cover with a borrowed photograph or line block (a film star, model, politician or historical figure), whether or not it relates to the story, and caption it.
  • Set titles centred in whatever jobbing type the printer holds, mixing faces and sizes line by line, mostly in capitals.
  • Print in one or two inks on newsprint and coloured card, accepting worn type, uneven inking and typographical errors.
  • Run the text dense and continuous inside, and use spare pages for the printer's and bookseller's advertisements and lists of other titles.

Bookseller-publishers and jobbing printers around Onitsha Main Market, eastern Nigeria, distributed across Nigeria and anglophone West Africa

02

Its design choices

From Stylogeny’s vocabulary of design choices: defining choices make the style, characteristic ones are usual, occasional ones turn up now and then.

Layout & composition
Space & hierarchy
Typography
Colour
Form & shape
Surface & texture
Ornament
Imagery
Medium & production
Tone & intent
Avoids
Generous white space, Full polychrome, Gradients, Gloss & highlights, Abundant decoration, Rebellious & subversive, Ironic & self-aware

Palette

  • #ece3cc
  • #1a1a1a
  • #e3a0a8
  • #b8312f
  • #7fa36b

Typefaces

  • Jobbing grotesque and gothic capitals for cover titles

  • Hand-set book roman for the running text

  • Odd fonts of wood and metal display type held by the printer

Known for

  • Cyprian Ekwensi, When Love Whispers

    Onitsha, late 1940s; often cited as the first pamphlet

  • Ogali A. Ogali, Veronica My Daughter

    1956

  • Okenwa Olisah, The Life in the Prison Yard

  • Thomas Orlando Iguh, The Last Days of Lumumba

  • D. Nkem Akuneme, Elekere Agwo

    The Quack Doctor (1964)

  • Kurt Thometz (ed.), Life Turns Man Up and Down

    High Life, Useful Advice, and Mad English (Pantheon, 2001)

03

Make something in this style

Say what you need, and Stylogeny’s image studio draws it from Onitsha Market Pamphlets’s design choices and checks it against them. It takes about a minute, and you get a link to share.

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04

Where it comes from, and what it’s close to

Before it

The style it grew out of, and the styles it borrowed from.

This styleOnitsha Market Pamphlets1947–1980 · Sub-Saharan Africa

After it

The styles that grew out of it.

No later style in the atlas grew out of it yet.

Alike in its design choices

Styles that make many of the same choices, related or not, besides those above.

05

Real works

Artefacts in museums, libraries and archives that show the style, linked at their source.

06

Sources

  1. Emmanuel N. Obiechina, An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets (Cambridge University Press, 1973)
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onitsha_Market_Literature
  3. https://findingaids.library.upenn.edu/records/UPENN_RBML_PUSP.PRINTCOLLECTION72 (University of Pennsylvania, Nigerian market literature collection: presses lost in the war)
  4. https://jot101.com/2020/01/an-onitsha-market-pamphlet/ (pink cover with recycled, captioned photograph)

How Stylogeny researches and checks a style: where the facts come from.