New from the Saint Austin Press: The Liturgical Year, The Mystical City of God, and five more titles
When the Saint Austin Press began above a shop in Southampton in 1996, the idea was simple: good Catholic books that had gone out of print should be brought back, and brought back well. Thirty years on, that is still the whole of our programme. This autumn we are publishing four titles at once, and all of them are books that no publisher has reset in several decades if not in living memory. This is the largest list we have ever put out, and we plan to release more titles in the coming months!
The Liturgical Year, newly typeset for the first time in 150 years
Dom Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year is the great commentary on Catholic worship: fifteen volumes that walk through Advent, Christmas, Lent, Passiontide, Easter, Pentecost and the long green season, and through the feasts of the saints, drawing together the Mass and the Office, Scripture and the Fathers, hymns and antiphons, with the Abbot of Solesmes's own historical and spiritual commentary on every day.
Every English edition available today is a photographic reprint of the Shepherd and Stanbrook translation as it was set in the nineteenth century, and the type has been wearing thinner with each generation of copies. Ours is the first edition to be set afresh in more than a hundred and fifty years. We have kept the pagination of the classic edition, so references still work, but everything else is new: a larger 220 × 160 mm page, more generous type, and — for the first time in any edition — printing throughout in red and black in the traditional manner of liturgical books, so that rubrics, headings and the structure of each day can be seen at a glance.
The volumes are sewn in small signatures so that they lie flat at any page, bound in mountain-green cotton cloth with gold-blocked spines, and finished with cream dust-jackets, patterned endpapers and Scottish art-silk headbands. Peter Kwasniewski contributes a foreword. Only one hundred sets have been printed. The Liturgical Year is available to pre-order now, with delivery expected in October in the United Kingdom and November in the United States.
The Mystical City of God, complete in four volumes
The Venerable Mary of Ágreda's Mystical City of God — her account of the life of the Blessed Virgin from the Immaculate Conception to the Assumption and Coronation, set down from private revelation and long contemplative prayer — has been read continuously since the seventeenth century, and the Fiscar Marison translation has served English readers since 1902. It has not been newly set since. Our edition resets the full text in four volumes, keeping the classic pagination, with red headings, blue cotton cloth, sewn bindings, a ribbon marker and patterned endpapers. It is a limited edition. Pre-order The Mystical City of God here.
The Council of Trent, in Latin and English
The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent are the Church's definitive statement on almost every doctrine disputed at the Reformation — justification, original sin, the sacraments, the Mass, purgatory, holy orders. Fr Henry Schroeder's English translation has been the standard since 1941, but until now no edition has placed it beside the Latin it translates. Ours does, on facing pages, and includes several texts that were not in Schroeder's original. The first edition is limited to sixty copies. Pre-order it here.
The Spiritual Life, by Adolphe Tanquerey
For most of the twentieth century, a Catholic who wanted a complete and orderly account of the interior life was handed one book: The Spiritual Life of Adolphe Tanquerey, the Sulpician theologian whose Précis de théologie ascétique et mystique became the seminary manual of a whole generation and, in Herman Branderis's English translation of 1930, the companion of countless lay readers besides. It moves methodically through the three ways — purgative, illuminative and unitive — grounding every step in Scripture, the Fathers and the Doctors, and it treats prayer, mortification, the virtues and the extraordinary mystical states with a clarity that has never been bettered.
Copies in circulation are almost all reprints of the old setting, small and grey. Ours is a new edition, reset in a single sewn hardcover volume in red cotton cloth with a cream dust-jacket and patterned endpapers, made to be read a few pages at a time for many years. Pre-order The Spiritual Life here.
Our current catalogue:
Butler's Lives of the Saints is the complete four-volume Thurston and Attwater edition of 1956 — 2,565 saints, arranged by the traditional calendar — in red cloth with gilt spines. It is in stock.
Bishop Knecht's Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture, eight hundred pages of doctrine and moral lesson drawn from every part of the Bible in short chapters for daily reading, comes in green cloth with a ribbon marker. It has gone out of stock but we have reprinted the books, so it should be back in stock soon. Pre-order it here.
And Lionel Johnson: Poetry and Prose gathers, for the first time, the best work of the convert poet and critic whom Yeats, Pound and Eliot all learned from, together with unpublished letters and a full critical introduction. It has gone out of stock but we have reprinted the books, so it should be back in stock soon. Pre-order it here.
Why we make them this way
None of these books is cheap to produce. Sewn bindings cost more than glue; cloth costs more than paper over board; two-colour printing costs more than one; resetting a fifteen-volume work costs a great deal more than photographing an old copy. We do it because a book that is read every day for thirty years should be made to survive thirty years of reading, and because a text that has shaped the Church's prayer deserves to be set with the care it was written with. If you would like to see how the books are made, we have written about it here.
Pre-ordered titles ship as soon as they arrive from the bindery, at no extra charge; if your order also includes titles in stock, those are sent at once. Thank you for reading, and for keeping these books in print.