neverendingjourney: The magazines were extremely popular with the homeless, who, as I later discovered, used them as rolling papers for their tobacco. You'd also see them lining a lot of their cardboard box homes.
I have often wondered what has happened to the mountains and mountains of printed material that the WTS is responsible for littering our planet with.
Just think of how proudly the WTS trots out how many magazines, books, and tracts the have distributed since Zion's Watchtower started publishing back in the late 1800s. (136 years of paper production)
I try to imagine how big of a mountain all that paper would make. How many acres would all that paper cover if it was laid out at a foot deep? Or, maybe 50 feet high...how big would that mountain be?
*and...how much profit does that much paper represent? - all the way from the cutting down of the tree, selling off the by-products of the paper making industry (turpentine, for one), the mining of the kaolin to make the paper white, etc, etc...and then...shipping it all over the world. To be used to roll tobacco and line cardboard boxes to sleep in (they do contribute to charity after all!).