The Desire of Wages

Chapter 15 - Selling the Saviour

by Dirk Anderson

In 1891, Ellen White told a friend what she paid the women who copied and prepared her manuscripts: “my workers have to receive seven dollars and a half per week and board themselves.”¹ Seven years later, The Desire of Ages went on sale. The finest edition, bound in full morocco with gilt edges, cost seven dollars. In other words, a woman could spend an entire week’s wages copying the prophet’s manuscripts and still barely afford the finest edition of the book she helped produce. The book was marketed as a message about the life of Christ. But it was also a pricey commercial product, and its author had a substantial financial stake in its success.

This chapter follows the money, and the money-trail tells a disturbing story.

The Price List

In June 1898, with the plates nearly ready, C. H. Jones, manager of the Pacific Press, wrote to his counterpart at the Review and Herald to describe the new book. It would run to about 900 pages. It would be printed on a special paper, made to order, so that the half-tone pictures would come out “almost, if not quite, as well as coated book.” Some of the best artists in New York had been at work on the illustrations. And it would be sold at these prices:²

“The royalty is to be 5% of the retail price,” Jones added. On the morocco book that came to thirty-five cents a copy for the author.³ It does not sound like much, but in 2025 dollars, that would be $13.77 per book.

This was a subscription book. It was not sold in bookstores. Canvassers carried a sample and a prospectus from door to door and took orders in advance, and Jones wanted “only experienced canvassers” on it, “as we want the territory thoroughly worked.” It was, he wrote, “a book that can be sold to the better classes as well as to the poor people.”⁴ A year later he put it more accurately: “‘Desire of Ages’ is the highest price book we have ever attempted to place on the market.” To be fair to Jones, he added that it was cheap compared with the lavish subscription sets of the big commercial publishers.⁵ But the SDA presses had never sold anything so costly, and not everyone was happy about it. The Review and Herald manager reported that leading men in the SDA corporation were complaining: “the price of the book is too high,” “it is too heavy, and rather awkward to handle,” and “some have taken quite a strong position against the book.”⁶

What about the poor people? The plan was to make them wait. In January 1899 Jones told W. C. White that the press might later issue “an edition leaving out the illustrations, to be sold as a trade book; but this we should not put on the market until the subscription book has had a good run.”⁷ The cheap edition came out in October 1899, at $1.50 in cloth, described as “within the reach of those who cannot afford to buy the subscription edition.”⁸ The life of Him who preached the gospel to the poor was sold first to those who could pay for gilt edges. The poor got their copy after the market had been worked. It was not about getting out a message. It was all about the money.

The Author’s Cut

Ellen White had been negotiating her share of this book for years. In February 1896 she wrote to her son Edson that she was “waiting for their decision on royalty. I offered to take twelve and a half cents if they would stand all the cost of plates and publishing.”⁹ When the manuscript finally went to the Pacific Press, W. C. White offered the publisher two choices. If the press paid all the costs of the engravings and plates, the royalty would be 5 percent of the retail price. If the author paid half the costs, the royalty would rise to 6½ percent. The press took the first offer, expecting the costs to be about $3,000. They came to more than $8,000.¹⁰

So the publisher carried the risk, and the author collected 5 percent of the retail price of every copy, whatever it had cost to make: thirty-five cents on every morocco book.

Then she became an owner as well. By November 1898 W. C. White had agreed, on his mother’s behalf, to take “a third interest in this book, and a set of plates.”¹¹ In October 1899 the contract was signed: a “one-third interest in subscription edition ‘Desire of Ages’ for your mother.”¹² Her set of plates carried with it the right to print and sell the book outside the United States and Canada, in Australia, Britain and beyond. Some members of the Pacific Press board grumbled that the Whites were getting “the lion’s share” of the territory.¹³ When the press thought of selling the book in smaller parts, Jones asked what royalty she would want, and the answer came back through her son: “You say you think your mother will be satisfied with 35 cts. per copy royalty.”¹⁴

Author, royalty-holder, part-owner, owner of plates, holder of foreign territory. Chapter 17 will follow the foreign money. For now it is enough to notice what kind of prophet this was. The apostles were told to take nothing for their journey, and “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). Ellen White negotiated for years to get the best deal possible.

Pictures of Christ

The most expensive part of the book was its pictures. The story of those pictures shows, better than anything else in this chapter, how she employed her testimonies to her own advantage.

In December 1897 White saw the first drawings for the book and was unhappy. They looked, she said, as if they were “made from Catholic designs or Catholic artists. The picture of Mary has a man’s face.” For an SDA, calling something "Catholic" was the worst sort of insult. White's answer? Spend more: “Better pay double price, or treble, and have pictures, if pictures must be had that will not pervert facts.”¹⁵

Marian Davis took charge of which drawings went in and which came out, and at her suggestion the press added “full-page engravings from the great masters.”¹⁶ In March 1898, impatient at the delays, White wrote to Jones:

I advise that the book be not delayed. It is greatly needed in the field, and I would hasten it out, with the cuts [pictures] you deem suitable. ... Whatever the cuts may be, if they are essential to the sale of the book, put them in.¹⁷

“Essential to the sale of the book.” The press did as she said. By the end, Jones admitted, “when we started out to illustrate ‘Desire of Ages’ we never intended to spend over $3,000, but instead of that it crept up to over $6,000.”¹⁸

Not all of the pictures were even theirs to use. About twenty of the full-page illustrations were photographs of famous European paintings, and when the book was prepared for Britain the publishers learned that “all, or nearly all, of these are copyrighted in Great Britain, and therefore cannot be used there without first securing the right.”¹⁹ Some owners agreed to sell permission. The German art publisher Franz Hanfstaengl refused permission for seven. Of the pictures still in question, Jones reported, six “cannot be purchased at any price.”²⁰ The manager of the London office wrote that he had “never had such trouble with a book before.”²¹ A book whose text was copied from other men’s books had been illustrated with other men’s pictures, and the owners of some of them had not been asked.

Light After the Bill

In September 1899, ten months after the book appeared and with the costs already sunk, a testimony arrived. Its title was “The Danger of Extravagance in Illustrating Our Books”:

Our books are being filled with expensive pictures, and this makes them too costly to give away, and too costly for those persons to buy who need them most. . . . Neither God nor heaven nor Christ, who is the image of the Father, can be truly represented by the art of man. If the Lord had thought it advisable to represent Christ in this way, His person would have been described in the writings of the apostle. . . . Every item in connection with this extravagant outlay was not presented before me. . . . A large sum of money was spent in illustrating The Desire of Ages, but this work will not be repeated. If I had known before what I now know, I would never have consented to the Pacific Press expending so much money on illustrations for The Desire of Ages.²²

Now, examine her statements before and after the bill:

Two weeks later she wrote again to the managers of both publishing houses: “we all have been trying to make The Desire of Ages and other recent publications attractive, so that they will sell readily. . . . But now light has come regarding the dangers and difficulties which attend these efforts. . . . I shall be more cautious in the future.”²³

“Now light has come.” It came after the drawings had been ordered, after she had told the press to put in whatever would sell the book, after the costs had doubled, and after the copyright owners had refused. She punctuated it by blaming the publisher: “Every item in connection with this extravagant outlay was not presented before me,” and she would never have “consented to the Pacific Press expending so much.” The press had spent the money on her book, on her instructions, to sell her copies, on which she drew her royalty. Within weeks of the testimony her son signed the contract making her a one-third owner of that same subscription edition, and asked the press for an itemized bill of the initial expense.²⁴

A prophet who sees the future would have seen this one coming. White’s light arrived the way ordinary hindsight does: once the invoice was on the table. As she looked upon that bill it seems as if it dawned on her: "Oh my! That was costly! I'm not doing that again!"

Who Bought It?

Chapter 2 showed how White exploited the holiness revival and placed Steps to Christ with non-SDA publisher Fleming Revell in 1892. That move paid off big-time for White. In 1897 she wrote that Revell had sent her “quite a sum of money, more than has come to me from some books; and I think more would come to me if he had more of my books to handle,” and that she would “place more books in his hand as soon as I can get them prepared.”²⁵ The Pacific Press pitched The Desire of Ages to the same churchgoing public, as a book “with which we can go to the very highest classes.”²⁶

That was the plan. The book was sold as a message for the world. The publishers knew where the money would really come from. When the Pacific Press began advertising the book before the Review and Herald had its own edition ready, the Review’s manager protested. “We consider that the trade with our own people will be altogether the best trade we shall ever get out of this book,” he wrote, and by announcing it early, the Pacific Press would “really get the cream of it.”²⁷ Jones replied that if the Review really felt it was not a book for outsiders, it could hardly push it “with vim and confidence.”²⁸ But the tract societies began by offering the cheapest binding at $2.50 “to our people” for two or three months, “so as to enable all to supply themselves.”²⁹ The first market for the life of Christ was the sect’s own members.

The members were then recruited to sell it. The Review and Herald turned White’s little book Steps to Christ into what its manager called “a sort of forerunner, or entering wedge for ‘Desire of Ages,’” printing 50,000 copies at a reduced price so that SDA members could buy four for a dollar and sell them to their neighbors.³⁰ A 25-cent paper edition of Steps to Christ carried “a good strong ad for ‘Desire of Ages,’” and the manager hoped it would “remove whatever prejudice may have existed in the minds of the people against the author.”³¹

That prejudice was real, and it was about money. The same manager explained why the press had printed five hundred copies of one of White’s testimonies on royalties and sent them out: “It has been said that every time an agent sold a book he was simply enriching the author.”³² SDAs themselves had noticed whose pocket the canvasser was filling. The publisher’s answer was not to lower the price or the royalty. It was to circulate a testimony where their prophet defended her practices.

The Merchandise of His Grace

Jesus drove the merchants out of the temple. In Ellen White's telling, He looked down through the centuries and saw how men would conceal the love of God and “make merchandise of His grace.” Those are powerful words. But they raise an unavoidable question: what happens when the message of Christ becomes a commodity, the authority of prophecy becomes a selling tool, and the woman claiming to speak for God has a financial stake in every copy sold?

Paul condemned those who made merchandise of the Word of God. He preached a gospel he had received freely and refused to turn it into a business. Yet here was a book about the life of Christ, presented as the product of divine inspiration, promoted through the machinery of a commercial publishing operation, and tied to royalties, ownership interests, and the protection of the author's income.

The greatest irony is that the very book that portrayed Jesus overturning the tables of those who made merchandise of God's grace became part of an enterprise in which His life, His words, and His image were packaged and sold. The temple merchants at least made no claim that their business was a revelation from God. White did. That is what makes the charge so serious: The Desire of Ages did not merely tell the story of Jesus. It turned that story into merchandise while claiming the authority of heaven.

Jesus said, “freely ye have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8). The question is whether the gospel was being freely given—or whether it had become the most valuable product in the prophet's publishing empire.

The next chapter examines what happened when the publishers tried to reduce the author's share.