A New Book for a New Year!

The story of St. Augustine Academy Press is a great example of God's sense of humor.  A busy mom with six children ends up homeschooling because the public schools are failing her children...then finds herself starting to make her own little booklets for them... Before she knows it, she's selling books to other homeschool moms, and ends up making a book about the Latin Mass that spreads like wildfire.  I still shake my head and wonder how all of this is possible.  And I have to praise God for it, because He loves to pick the least likely person to do things for Him, so that it will be obvious whose work it really is.  "But God, I'm an architect, I don't know how to publish books!"  Don't worry, kid, I got this...

Why do I bring this up?  Because the book I am about to introduce is part of the saga of how we operate as a business.  You see, publishing requires a large upfront investment, to pay for thousands of books to be printed, and some degree of forethought as to how and where all those books will be stored until they are all sold. That's why normally only big publishers can do it, and they will only publish books they can sell thousands of. 

I get around this problem of investment and storage and not-being-able-to-sell-thousands-of-copies by printing most of our books using digital print-on-demand printers.  This means I usually only have to print a few copies at a time...just enough to keep on hand to fill customers' orders.  The little room in our house that serves as my office used to have shelves filled with all those books, and we would pack your orders from those shelves.  (Eventually we outgrew that system...)

But some books--the kind we really love--have beautiful illustrations and features that demand being printed the old-fashioned way.  Treasure and Tradition was the first of these.  We had to invest a lot of money in that first print run, and it was a real risk.  I thought it would take years to sell all 3000 copies of that book.  Instead, it met a need and quickly became popular...and we sold those 3000 copies in under 3 months!

So I invested the windfall that we earned from that book in printing another beautiful book I had been yearning to produce, but could never afford: the Centenary Edition of The King of the Golden City. It was such a gift to have the ability to create an exact replica of the original 1921 edition, right down to the dust cover, and the foil stamping, and the little bookplate inside... And we have repeated that process again and again...the money we make doesn't line our pockets; each year I turn our profits over into producing more beautiful books. 

So each calendar year, as things wind down, I try to see if there are any more projects we can get to the printer before year's end, in order to use up the balance in our account (because I must admit, I'd rather not surrender any more of it in taxes than I absolutely have to!).  And this year, now that my kids have grown and have some experience with graphic design, I realized that I could quickly get another really beautiful book printed.  So in the days leading up to Christmas, while we were busy preparing food and gifts and Christmas cards, my two oldest daughters and I were feverishly cleaning up speckles from the color illustrations in this new book.

Introducing...Loving & Giving, a beautifully illustrated book by Clare Dawson, the younger sister of Muriel Dawson, who was well known as an illustrator of children's books.

Someone once asked me what was the most important consideration in the children's books I choose to publish. I didn't hesitate for a moment. "Beauty!" I responded. "But what about doctrinal solidity?" he protested. Well... I don't look at books that aren't doctrinally solid. But beauty is the best way to teach capital-T truth. I want children to fall in love with their faith!

Well, this is a book that definitely answers that description. So much love went into creating this beautiful vehicle for presenting the Christian faith to children. Just like the other book we carry that contains Dawson's wonderful illustrations, Heavenward Bound, it is an Anglo-Catholic book (read more about that here)...but you would never have guessed that if I hadn't told you. (Well...those who are astute may notice that the De Profundis included at the very end is the translation used in the Anglican church, which many of you who are familiar with Rutter's Requiem will recognize...)

However, it needed a little help in the graphics department in order to bring it to the level it deserves.  Here are a few highlights I'd like to share with you, to show you the sort of work we do when preparing books to be reprinted.

When we reproduce books that are only black and white, it's easy to remove that yellow cast of the page background.  In fact, we have a great scanner that does that for us, giving us crisp, clean scans.  But with color illustrations like these, it's tricky to pull the yellow out of the background without affecting the colors on the page.  And when you do get most of that yellow background out, there are lots of little speckles left behind, because paper often has dirt and ink splotches and little flecks of wood pulp in it that you don't notice with your eye, but the scanner picks them up.  So we have to clean those up manually.  You can see the before-and-after here (props to my daughter, who did the hard work of cleaning up this page!):

Ideally, the sort of books we like to reprint don't need any changes, and we try at all costs to avoid making them, because one of the hallmarks of books you can trust is that they haven't been tampered with.  This is why all of our textbook reprints are direct reproductions and not retypeset. You can see for yourself that nothing has been changed.

But this particular book is a great example of one that needed some help to reach its full potential.  It was probably economically produced by its original publisher, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Why do I say that?  Because the typesetting was really dreadful, and some of the beautiful illustrations were printed so small that you can hardly see what is happening in them.  So first of all, we knew we wanted to increase the page size from 8 x 10 inches to a standard 8.5 x 11, so that we could enlarge these illustrations.

We also needed to retypeset the book, so that we could fix problems like the one you see on this page, where the illustrations and type overlap one another, making a real mess: 

A simple but necessary improvement.

Here's a page showing how sad it was that the illustrations were so small. We were able to enlarge them so that you can actually see the beautiful images and read the words in them.  But this page also introduces a little problem we ran into frequently in this book. There is a lot of hand lettering, which is really lovely...but our author/illustrator often ran out of room for her lettering, and chose some...er...interesting ways of cramming in the extra letters.  This example was...sort of charming, but...mmm...I think it's important in children's books to be able to understand what the title of a page says.  So...we fixed this one...

And this one too. Moving a line of text to the right isn't that troublesome, but to the left like that? (Do you see it? The last line in the third stanza...) There's no reason to make it behave badly like that...so we moved the flower (which was in an odd place to begin with) and set it to rights.

I might have been convinced to leave these little quirks alone, since they are the way this book was produced years ago. But similar problems appeared throughout the book, and there was no reason not to improve the spacing of words that I'm sure the illustrator herself would have fixed long ago if it had been as easy to do for her as it was for me. (She would have had to redraw the entire page!)  

A great example is this lovely Baptism certificate, with its letters looking sad, all smashed up against the illustration and the frame, when a few little tweaks could make everything less crowded and much happier. You probably have to look really closely in order to see what I changed...it's subtle, but much improved.

Somehow we managed to get these files to the printer by year's end and they are in process as we speak. As always, we look forward to their arrival, when we will get to show you our Before-and-After comparison of the old and the new! Until then, we wish you all a blessed New Year and a Holy Epiphany (or Theophany for our Eastern brothers and sisters)!