Nun or none

Collecting Watch Tower literature for many includes collecting variants of publications. Sometimes changes were made due to refinements of belief, other times proof reading glitches or copyright issues played a part. Sometimes what was produced caused questions to be raised. One example of the latter is the picture found in the book Riches (1936).

The original line drawing showed a witness preaching to an elderly gentleman. In the background is a nun who appears to be using a tuning fork on the householder (?) while discouraging the witness from his work. The only problem was that, if you looked at the picture quickly, it might appear to some that the nun was “blessing” the witness’ efforts. A quick check of the text in the book would immediately disabuse anyone of that idea, but feedback showed the advisability of changing the picture. As a result, a new picture was drawn, which replaced the nun with a phonograph.

This meant that there were soon two editions of Riches in circulation. As a result, some wrote in. More than one copy of the standard reply has survived, but the one pictured below was sent to a John Shearrow from Alliance, Ohio. The identical address on a 1940s registration card identifies him as John Cunningham Shearrow (1890-1962) who married and had one daughter, but no further information has been gleaned.

The letter advised any with the “nun” copy to carefully remove the page, and these could still be placed without any picture at this point. As there was no text on the reverse of the picture, this was quite easy to do.

So collectors can find at least three versions of Riches, one with the nun, one with a page neatly cut out, and then a later printing with a replacement picture.