BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS

John Wesley started it. Back in the 18th Century, when British preachers stayed put and theological tomes were bulky, expensive and dull, he revolutionized religion by sending his ministers on circuit and reaching the masses with a flood of books that were small, cheap, popularly written. He supported himself through publishing, cleared $150,000 to spread his cause. Not all the 400 books he wrote or published were religious--one was Primitive Physick, a book of home remedies (example: "The Head Ake: Apply to each Temple the thin yellow Rind of a lemon, newly pared off") that went through more than 40 editions.

Wesley also made the printing press an effective weapon in his holy wars. Calvinists, enraged at his teaching Free Grace instead of Predestination, answered him thus in The Gospel Magazine:

O think of this, thou grey-haired sinner,

Ere Satan pick thy bones for dinner.

Augustus Toplady, author of Rock of Ages, aimed a sizzling pamphlet at Wesley entitled An Old Fox Tarred and Feathered, which a contemporary remarked should have been called "Go to Hell, by the author of Come to Jesus."

Wesley bade his U.S. followers use the printing press too. Here it worked still better. Backbone of its success: circuit riders who stuffed their saddlebags with Methodist literature, supplemented their slim stipends by doubling as book peddlers. Methodism's strength in the Middle West dates directly to libraryless days when preachers' saddlebags were a valued source of reading matter. Every minister was also a subscription agent, and by 1830 the Methodist Christian Advocate had the largest circulation of any U.S. periodical --30,000 (its 1941 circulation: 275,000). It grew so rapidly that the post office had to add extra wagons to carry the Advocate's mailings from New York.

Started in Manhattan in 1789 on a borrowed capital of $600, the Methodist Board of Publication is America's oldest and biggest religious publishing house. Last week it reported a whopping $5,524,429 gross in the first combined year of operation since the Methodist Episcopal, M.E. South and the Methodist Protestant Churches merged to form the country's largest Protestant church. Last year it printed 1,500,000 books and 130,000,000 periodicals. Last week, by appropriating $200,000 of its 1940-41 proceeds for ministerial pensions, it ran the amount it has given to Methodist causes up to some $12,000,000.

Still forward-looking after 152 years, the Methodist Board of Publication last week merged its 55 different religious-education periodicals into a streamlined series of 24, which will all come out with Volume I, Number I next month. They range from Beginners' Lesson Pictures to Challenge, a new magazine designed to give lapsed churchgoers a fresh interest in religion. Total print order for 24 first issues: 4,540,000 copies.

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