Word: prophete
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...newcomer to the book-publishing business, was introduced to a Lebanese artist-poet in a Greenwich Village cafe. Knopf had never heard of Kahlil Gibran, but his young publishing firm needed authors, and during the next four years he published three Gibran books; all sold dismally. The Prophet, brought out in 1923, did slightly better...
...Knopf's surprise, the demand for The Prophet doubled the following year -and doubled again the year after that. Since then, annual sales have risen almost at an exponential rate: from 12,000 in 1935 to 111,000 in 1961 to 240,000 last year. Today, with more than 2,000,000 copies in print, The Prophet is selling at the rate of 5,000 a week...
...available in three editions,-two of them illustrated by twelve Gibran sketches of idealized nudes. The firm once launched an advertising campaign years ago but hastily canceled it when the only result was to reduce sales. It has not since promoted the book in any way. Who buys The Prophet"? Knopf can only guess. "It must be a cult," he has said, "but I have never met any of its members. I haven't met five people who have read Gibran...
Gibran was instructed in the Maronite rites of the Roman Catholic Church, but he was not a churchgoer, and his book would be out of place in any cathedral. The Prophet, Almustafa, about to sail away from Orphalese, where he has sojourned for twelve years, submits to questions from the villagers. They ask him about Love, Joy, Sorrow, Freedom, Pain, Giving, Work and other human affairs. He answers in mystical terms that seem to carry great meaning: "Work is love made visible." "Your joy is your sorrow unmasked." "Beauty is Eternity gazing at itself in a mirror...
...comforts people," says a Knopf editor, William Koshland. "It appeals to the bereaved. Tens of copies are sold when someone dies." A distant relative of the author once speculated that the book is bought by young men for the purpose of "seducing women" by quoting it. Seventeen magazine, noting Prophet's popularity, quoted a teenage-girl reader to the effect that "it is unique and just right for clearing cobwebs and refueling weary souls." In a word, it seems to provide a philosophy for the somewhat immature, a creed for the vaguely well-meaning, a consolation for those...