The Prophet's Profits

In 1916, Alfred A. Knopf, then 23 and a 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.

Of a rather ambitious first printing of 2,000, Knopf managed to sell 1,159 copies, and with that, presumably exhausted the market for Gibran.

To 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.

The Cult. What supports such phenomenal sales? Certainly no effort of Knopf's other than making the book 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. But you are eternity and you are the mirror."

"It 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 who think religion is a misty feeling.

Sown Scraps. Mysticism threads itself not only through Gibran's work but through his life. As a boy of four in Bsherri, a village perched amid Lebanon's northern mountains, he sowed bits of torn paper in his garden and waited patiently for a harvest of full leaves. The mystic did not find a cult until he moved to the U.S., where he exhibited his drawings--which blend elements of William Blake and Maxfield Parrish-and held a kind of mystical court in his Greenwich Village studio.

A celibate, Gibran nevertheless exerted a strong spiritual influence on women. A Manhattan jeweler's wife with whom he corresponded directed that his letters should be buried with her in her coffin. Barbara Young, a poet, swore allegiance to the master after hearing The Prophet read in a Greenwich Village church (he was also present as a listener). She served Gibran as secretary until his death from cancer, at 48, in 1931.

Mixed Harvest. The scraps of paper planted by Gibran have borne bountiful fruit: nearly $1,000,000 in royalties to date, some $100,000 more every year. Gibran, who coveted both fame and riches, died too soon to reap most of this harvest. His will left everything to the place of his birth, Bsherri. But except for Gibran's body, which was sent home to be entombed in the monastery of Mar Markis, Bsherri has little to show for it.

A committee of 40, appointed to administer the unexpected riches, sponsors an annual Gibran festival and maintains a Gibran museum that charges admission and turns a modest profit. Plans for a grander museum, for a hospital, for a literary contest in his memory, have had to wait while the committee settles quarrels among its own membership and disputes in court with lawyers representing Marianna Gibran, the poet's sister, who lives in Boston and was not remembered in his will.

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