Distribution
Since the first issue of The Watchtower in 1879, with 6,000 copies printed, circulation of The Watchtower continued to increase, and the magazine has not missed an issue. The magazine is printed in nineteen different countries; about 25% of the total is printed at one of the organization's printeries in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The monthly Public Edition has an average print run of about 45,000,000 copies, making it the magazine with the largest circulation in the world. The print run of the monthly Study Edition is not stated in the English edition; the Russian edition states a print run of over 14,000,000.
The magazine is distributed by Jehovah's Witnesses, who consider their preaching work to be a public service. Witnesses commonly offer these magazines in the course of their house-to-house ministry. They are also distributed by approaching people in public places, or given informally to doctors, academics, politicians and acquaintances. The Watchtower may also be seen left as reading material in public places, including bus terminals, or laundromats. The Watch Tower Society advises against distribution practices such as mailbox drops and placing large stacks in public places, which they consider to be less effective methods of arousing interest compared to personal presentation of the literature.
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Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The man who pretends that the distribution of income in this country reflects the distribution of ability or character is an ignoramus. The man who says that it could by any possible political device be made to do so is an unpractical visionary. But the man who says that it ought to do so is something worse than an ignoramous and more disastrous than a visionary: he is, in the profoundest Scriptural sense of the word, a fool.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)