[Milton-L] Milton in The Watchtower

[Patrick Scott]

The Pontifex Factor and Ho Chi Minh are not mutually incompatible. 
Pontifex refers to selling [originally tracts and Sunday school prize
books] in maximum quantity (not to maximizing the number of readers, and
maybe many were never read), Ho Chi Minh to maximizing either the number
of readers or the percentage of books that were read, rather than the
number of sales.  There should be some sort of multidimensional graph
somewhere for good-cause publishing with alternative plottings by
different criteria (sales as against investment, readers as against
sales, readers as against investment), letting different priorities in
motivation chart the trade-offs.

An alternative perspective on Milton in the Watchtower is to see it as
an indication of Milton being a brand-name of continuing high
status/value in a segment of the modern religious market that has little
direct contact with the typical modern literature department (or
presence in the the broader literary scene).  Milton's brand value might
be perceived or shared by any or several of the article writer, the
magazine editor or advisors, those who fund the magazine, or those who
distribute it so widely.  Equally, it might be only ambivalently shared
by the groups so far listed, and instead be perceived by any or all of
them as a value held by all or some of those to whom the magazine is to
be distributed ("the target readership").   Any of these, and especially
the last, suggest that the broader residual culture of the U.S. in the
early 2000's retains greater lingering awareness of and respect for the
traditional canon than one might sometimes imagine.




Patrick Scott
Director of Special Collections, 
Thomas Cooper Library,
& Professor of English,
University of South Carolina,
Columbia, SC 29208, USA.
Tel: 803-777-1275
Fax: 803-777-4661, attn Dr Scott
E-mail: scottp at gwm.sc.edu
 

>>> jefferyhodges at yahoo.com 8/3/2007 2:47 PM >>>
Patrick Scott wrote:
   
  I am also reminded of an axiom in book history, the Pontifex Factor
[after Ernest Pontifex's grandfather, the religious publisher in The Way
of All Flesh]: "You sell more of a book to be given away than you do of
a book to be read."

Carrol Cox responded:
   
  Ho Chi Minh disagreed. Publishing a resistance paper in Vietnam in
the late 1930s, he rejected suggestions to make it free because, he
claimed, people would not read seriously a paper given away.
   
  Jeffery Hodges retorts:
   
  Well, Ho Chi Minh didn't know about the internet! (Though I grant
that taking seriously a lot of what's written there doesn't always come
easily...)
   
  Jeffery Hodges


University Degrees:

Ph.D., History, U.C. Berkeley
(Doctoral Thesis: "Food as Synecdoche in John's Gospel and Gnostic
Texts")
M.A., History of Science, U.C. Berkeley
B.A., English Language and Literature, Baylor University

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jefferyhodges at yahoo.com 

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