Subscribe to our RSS feed here.
What we are:
We are a small family apostolate located in the Chicago area, dedicated to finding and republishing out-of-print classics of Catholic literature. Our special focus is the work of Mother Mary Loyola, but we also feature the work of many other well-beloved Catholic authors of yesteryear. Though we started out by offering photographic reprints of these older books, most of our titles have now been completely retypeset.
Who we are:
Lisa Bergman, a graduate of the Notre Dame School of Architecture, found herself using her degree in unusual ways while homeschooling her six children. Her artistic sense (that is, perfectionism) led her to create her own little scripture booklets for the children, incorporating beautiful classic art with the sacred texts. When faced with helping her children navigate the Latin Mass, this resulted in our first children's Missal, Learning to Follow the Mass. Learning the art of self-publishing in the process, she next turned her attention to a treasure trove of older, out-of-print books that she found online, especially the work of Mother Mary Loyola. Before she knew it, a publishing company was born.
Larry Bergman is our CFO, now assistant typesetter, and long-suffering husband.
Books for the Traditional Catholic...are you traditionalists?
We get asked questions like this often, because of our motto and the books we carry. When we think of -isms, we're always reminded of Grandpa in the movie You Can't Take it With You (1938): "Yeah, sure, you know, Communism, Fascism, Voodoo-ism, everybody's got an -ism these days..."
We will confess to being lovers of old things, but we especially love the rich traditions of our Church. We love them because they make more memorable the way that we meet God in our everyday lives. And we love these books because they speak to those traditions. Most of them were published around 100 years ago. But we don't make this love into an -ism, and as we fear the judgment of God, we consider it our duty to be faithful to the Magisterium of the Church.
Nevertheless, we pray for the day when lovers of tradition don't have to be accused of having an -ism just because we want our lives to express the fullness of the riches of our Church.
Our Mission:
It is our primary goal to provide the best possible reading material for Catholic families, so that they can stay true to their mission of bringing up the next generation in the Truth of our Faith.
How you can help!
If you love our books and you find yourself nodding in agreement when you read about our mission, you may also feel drawn to help us in that mission. There are a number of ways you can help, some of which are very easy and can be done right here at your computer in a matter of minutes.
1. Spread the word!
We are just one family doing our best to make a difference. We don’t have a staff or a budget and we certainly don’t do huge ad campaigns. We rely on word of mouth to spread the word about our books, because we believe that Truth, couched in Beauty, is the best advertisement there is. Our books speak for themselves.
So if you love our books, make sure you tell your friends, relatives, anyone who you think would like them too!
2. Leave reviews here on our website and on Amazon.com
Again, if you’re anything like me, you want reassurance that the books your kids are reading are as good as the people selling them say they are. I’m a big reader of reviews for almost everything I buy.
If you really love these books, please take a moment to leave a review so that others can benefit from your experience.
But where your reviews can really make a big difference is on Amazon.com.
Many people, myself included, aren’t big fans of what Amazon stands for. But the plain fact is that they have a huge global reach that our little website can’t compete with. Mother Mary Loyola’s books are making their way into homes around the world through Amazon.com, and it’s there that we need to make our presence felt. For a visitor to Amazon who will never see our website, and read what you are reading now, they need to know why these books will make a big difference in their lives. For that, we have to count on you!
This link will take you to a page on Amazon that lists all of our books that they currently carry. Please consider leaving a review there to help spread the word.
3. Suggest books you’d like to see reprinted.
We’ve had some great tips from our readers in the past, and we welcome any suggestions you may have. Please do bear in mind, however, that we are mostly limited to works that were published prior to 1923. Current copyright law regarding works in the public domain is frozen at that date. There have been a few cases where we have been able to reprint works that were published after that, but these were special cases that required a lot of legwork that we simply don’t have the experience or staff to pursue on a regular basis.
That being said, if you would like to see a post-1923 work reprinted and have some experience in tracking down its copyright status, we welcome your efforts!
4. Volunteer to proofread a book.
The process of reprinting these books involves scanning the text using an overhead scanner that does not damage these older, more fragile books. (Would you believe we won it in a contest?!?) Then we run the scans through an OCR engine—that is, Optical Character Recognition. It “reads” the image of each page and makes its best guess as to what each letter and word says. But even the best OCR software makes errors, and because it has the intelligent feature of attempting to guess what the word is, it sometimes make some very interesting errors! So the resulting files have to be very carefully proofread to catch the sometimes minor but important errors.
This is a time consuming process, and we can significantly speed up the rate at which we are able to get these books typeset if we have help in doing the proofreading beforehand.
If this sounds like something you would like to do, let us know!