According to Wikipedia

[trainedseal]

on this day in 1667, "John Milton (pictured), blind and impoverished, sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10."

That's incredibly, monstrously depressing to me.

Comments

[malathion]

Hrm. According to this web calculator, that's £1,189.06 today, or about 2,123.54 USD.

Well, I hope the person who bought it turned a profit...

[ex_karamazov744]

Worse deals have been struck.

[bobertholman]

I dislike Paradise Lost, and therefore find this appropriate. It may be a fine book, but frankly, I haven't found the paitence for it either of the times I've had to deal with it. Shame about the blindness and poverty though, just in general.

[trainedseal]

I dislike large portions of PL, but it makes me tremendously sad to think that a work that required that much effort and technical brilliance was sold.

Hmm.

[bogus_beatnik]

Very depressing indeed. Something that is really cool though, that I didn't know, "1810 - Beethoven composes his famous piano piece, Für Elise."

Re: Hmm.

[alljournals]

Interesting that you bring Beethoven into this--I read a while ago that the shortness of his last string quartet, the sixteenth, was actually due to the fact that he felt he wasn't being paid enough for it by his publisher. "If he sends me abbreviated ducats he shall have an abbreviated quartet," was how he put it. For most of the other late quartets he got 50 ducats each, so the payment for this one must have been noticeably less.

[kennyg]

I would argue that in 1667 that £10 would be of significantly more value than $2,000 today. Depending on the method, not to discount what mal said, but more to reinfoce it, it could be worth more than $50,000 today. Also, only very recently have people come to value copyrights so highly.