"Food For Thinking Christians," by Charles Taze Russell (1881). This version is a text version. This book served as a prototype for the later series of Russell's books entitled Millennial Dawn (Studies in the Scriptures). The booklet was also distributed as a special issue of the September 1881 Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. Russell wrote this description of the book on page 367 of Thy Kingdom Come: "It is not a little remarkable that it was during the last six months of the year 1881 that FOOD FOR THINKING CHRISTIANS, a book of 166 pages, was issued, and circulated to the extent of one million four hundred thousand copies throughout the United States and Great Britain.
Three items connected with that book and its wide and sudden distribution contribute to mark it as at least peculiar: (1) Perhaps no other book ever reached so large a circulation in so brief a space of time, or by the same methods. It was distributed gratuitously at the church doors in all the largest cities of the United States and Great Britain by the messenger boys of the District Messenger Service on three successive Sundays, and in the smaller towns through the mails. (2) The money to defray this expense ($42,000) was voluntarily donated for the purpose, without solicitation. (3) It was, so far as we know, the first book ever published which pointed out the distinction between the high-calling of the Gospel Church and the Restitution favors for the world in general, and it pointed out the date of the close of that high-calling as October, 1881." Russell later chartered the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. He was succeeded by J.F. Rutherford in 1917 who renamed the organization Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931.