> do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect? Whether or not a book has a "big effect", depends I think on numerous factors, and a publisher would affirm this:
- its content and form - who wrote it - the life and doings of the author - the specific context it is written in, or written for - who it is written for - how the book is marketed - whether it is bought in order to read it, or for some other reason or fashion (a book might have an effect which has nothing to do with its real content, or it might sell lots of copies without its content influencing anybody very much). I have commented on the anthropology of the uses of books as cultural artifacts already once before on Marxmail, referring to postmodernist culture. If you consider Marx's book Capital, it had very little readership in the 19th century, and if it did, this owed more to Marx's political engagements or reputation probably. It became a hit in, of all places, Russia. Pamphlets or short books by Kautsky, Lafargue, Engels, Mehring, Bebel, Jaures, Lenin etc. were far more popular, and there were literally hundreds in that genre. Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof (it wasn't exactly holiday reading of course), never mind digested and understood. Only after the founding of the Marx-Engels Institute and subsequently the transformation of Marxism into a state ideology, were large quantities of the book sold. To this day, communication theory remains a very much under-researched topic in Marxist circles. References: Ernest Mandel, The place of Marxism in history Paul Dukes, October and the World (According to the Guiness book of records, the bestselling book of all time is the Bible, the highest circulation magazine is the US Parade, and the honour of the highest circulation attained by a newspaper went to Komsomolskaya Pravda selling just under 22 million copies in 1990.)
