Each year, Edinburgh plays host to the largest arts festival in the world. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe welcomes thousands of performers presenting thousands of shows. Almost every one of these productions arrives with a stack of flyers to distribute throughout the festival.

Together, these flyers form thousands of unique pieces of graphic design, ranging from the polished and professional to the scrappy and DIY. They have become an iconic part of the Fringe experience, with flyering hubs such as the Royal Mile becoming destinations in their own right for performers and audiences alike.

Every flyer tells the story of a performance, a company and a moment in the history of the Edinburgh Fringe. Together, they form a unique record of the Festival itself.

Yet flyers are, by their nature, ephemeral. Once the Fringe ends, most are discarded and quickly disappear.

The Edinburgh Fringe Flyer Archive exists to preserve and document this distinctive aspect of Fringe culture by building as complete a collection of flyers as possible. Through cataloguing, digitisation and long-term preservation, the Archive aims to ensure that these snapshots of the Edinburgh Fringe remain available for future performers, researchers, audiences and anyone with an interest in the history of the Festival.