The Club Car in Baltimore is usually a place for drag shows, art exhibits and cocktails, but on a recent Friday night it was more of a book club.
Patrons showed up with a copy of a book that mysteriously showed up in thousands of Baltimoreans mailboxes.
“I had a friend who made a post online being like, did anyone else get this book?” said Ryan Haas, part owner of Club Car.
The bar decided to create a happy hour around the books with happy hour prices for people who brought copies in.
“My friend and I had a back and forth that was kind of like funny,” Haas said. “As the weeks went on, it was like, more and more people started sharing it on Instagram, but everyone's like, ‘I'm going toss this book. I'm going throw it away.’ And we were like, ‘Maybe we should throw a happy hour for anyone who got the book. And we’ll just figure out what we do with them next.’”
The mysterious book is called The Great Controversy and was written in 1858 by Ellen White and this summer copies littered the streets of Baltimore, filled little libraries and clogged up trash cans.
It’s considered an important text to Seventh Day Adventists’, a Protestant religious sect that worships on Saturdays and believes a second coming is near.
“This particular book is hugely important to the Adventist,” said Jeff Wright, a former Seventh Day Adventist and researcher on a religion project at Elon University. “If you think about the Mormon missionaries who knock on your door and want to leave a copy of the Book of Mormon, this is as close as the Adventists get to, you know, something kind of similar and at that level.”
It predicts a future alliance between the Vatican and the United States that persecutes Seventh Day Adventists.
Ellen White is the co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, a prolific author who wrote about everything from agriculture to social relationships.
She also claims to have had more than 2,000 prophetic visions.
Remnant Publications, based in Michigan and founded by a Seventh Day Adventist, is behind the mass mailing of the books.
Ron Goss, a Seventh-day Adventist minister who works with Remnant Publications, says Baltimore isn’t the first city to receive the books. Philadelphia has gotten about 720,000 copies, as have San Francisco, Portland and Chicago.
“The goal is to try to urge people to accept it,” Goss said. “They can throw it away. It's up to them, but we just want to try to help them to understand about history.”
Goss says the books cost about $1.40 to make and send out, something he says is a cheap way to spread the word.
But there’s debate on if mass mailing books in antiquated language is really the best way to win over an audience.
Mara Einstein is the author of Hoodwinked, a book on religious marketing practices.
“If they get even a handful of people to read the book and then talk about it with other people, then it's doing the job that marketing supposed to do,” she said. “That said, who is going to be particularly interested in reading this kind of writing? I don't think there's going to be a lot of people that do this. I think it's, frankly, I think it's them throwing money away.
For Sammie Majors, a patron at Club Car, she said it just wasn’t her vibe.
“I think it came in the door,” Majors said. “Ours had already been soaked in the rain because our mailbox was left open, I'm sure there's people out there reading them. It just isn’t for me or people I know.”
The book isn’t exactly beach reading. The 470-page book contains passages like:
“When the protection of human laws shall be withdrawn from those who honor the law of God, there will be, in different lands, a simultaneous movement for their destruction.”
However, despite the archaic language, Goss said Remnant Publications still wants everyone in the nation to own a copy of The Great Controversy, so if you haven’t gotten a copy, you could be next.
