`Paradise Lost' Found -- Rare Copy Of Classic Printed Illegally In 1764

PITTSBURGH - Demand was so great 200 years ago for John Milton's "Paradise Lost" that several printers produced pirated editions on flimsy paper, complete with crude illustrations of Satan, Adam and Eve and the snake.

Such bootleg Miltons were not built to last. But one of them has.

Paper-eating worms and the brown stains of time have spared a 1764 edition of Milton's 12-part epic, kept in a safe at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., 50 miles east of Pittsburgh.

The book is one of the best remaining examples of the pirate literature that flourished during the 18th century, said John Shawcross, a prominent Milton researcher and retired English professor at the University of Kentucky.

The monks who founded St. Vincent's in the mid-19th century are believed to have bound the copy in leather and brought it with them from Germany.

Shawcross came to the school to inspect the book last week after finding an obscure reference to it in a Library of Congress catalog.

College librarians had not realized it was a unique bootleg version of the classic until Shawcross pointed it out.

"Paradise Lost" first appeared in 1667; Milton issued a reorganized version in 1674, the year of his death.

Bootleg versions of the book were "a cheap way of producing things that people wanted, and readers thought they were getting the real thing," said Shawcross, who is compiling a list of everything written by or about Milton.

The unidentified printers of St. Vincent's bootleg edition even had the gall to put Milton's stamp of approval on their title page, he said.

"Paradise Lost," is Milton's 12-part account of humanity's struggle with good and evil.

It rivaled the popularity of the Bible to such a degree that many of Milton's quotes and characters were often miscredited to the Bible, Shawcross said.