Post #2176653

Ah, the perils of being an author: It was on this day in 1667 that the blind and impoverished John Milton sold Paradise Lost to a printer for the princely sum of ten pounds, so it could be entered into the Stationers' Register, a record book which constituted an early form of copyright law. It doesn’t sound like much, especially when you consider how, at the time, it consisted of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. Curiously, the number ten seems to be something of a recurring motif in this little story In today’s money those ten pounds are equivalent to around about twenty one and a half thousand pounds. So, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad payday after all. #bookstodon #WritersOfMastodon #Author #Novel