Panic in the Pews: A Retrospective

When my children were young, I often made little booklets for them, usually to accompany some of our religion activities. These homemade booklets paired beautiful works of art with the words of scripture to tell the story of Christ’s life on earth.

My first real book was born from this same concept, applied to the Traditional Latin Mass…a homemade booklet that paired numerous images with the words of the Mass. It began as nothing more than color printouts in page protectors and a binder. But many of our friends wanted copies of this booklet, so I began using an online digital printer called Lulu to print them in a format that was a little nicer.

Once I knew how to turn an idea into an actual book, there was one in particular that I wanted to print. You see, by this point, we had five children under the age of 8, and having recently made the switch from a large parish with a huge cry room to a small Latin Mass parish where much more was expected of them during Mass, I wanted some ammunition in the weekly Sunday morning skirmishes.

I remembered a book I had as a youth, with humorous cartoons exposing children whose reverence during Mass was not up to scratch. There was the girl who refused to lift her bottom off the pew while kneeling, and the little boy who insisted upon standing on the kneeler…common foibles that are hardly sinful, but which continually challenge mom and dad. While we were thankful that at least most of the time, most of our kids could be quiet and sit still, I didn’t like turning the other cheek when these irksome behaviors would crop up.

But I couldn’t find this book, despite its images remaining so vivid in my memory. It was no longer in our family’s possession, and after so many years, I couldn’t even guess what its name was. Without that, searching for it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Faced with this roadblock, I hatched a new idea…

A dear friend of mine, Marianna, had a teenage daughter who had an unusual talent for drawing witty caricatures. What if we worked together to make a book of our own?  I wasn’t sure how we would do it, but her drawings were wickedly funny, and I knew that any book of this sort absolutely had to be funny. If there was one thing I had learned from raising young children, it was the “spoonful of sugar” concept from Mary Poppins…Children pay attention to things that they like.

So in the spring of 2008, I floated an idea with Marianna: would Erin consider illustrating a little book of goofy verses about kids who misbehave in church? It was a confusing concept at first, until I showed them a book I had recently discovered, called The Goops and How to Be Them, by Gelett Burgess. This hilarious book, published in 1900, employed reverse psychology to encourage children to use good manners, by showing them just how unpleasant it is to be around those who are…well…Goops. This was exactly how I wanted to teach children proper reverence…by showing them examples of what did not meet the mark…and rather than chiding or scolding, just poke fun at them. Who would want to be a Goop in church???

I wrote some little doggerel verses and 14-year-old Erin started sketching. And life happened…it took more than a year. Dr. Seuss and Norman Rockwell helped inspire us both along the way. And finally, by the early days of December 2009, I held this little book in my hands!

Panic in the Pews was the first time I had consciously set out to create a book that I would publish and sell. And once it was a reality, I quickly discovered what all self-published authors are faced with: if you want to sell books, you have to promote them. An audience is crucial, because you run out of sympathetic family and friends who will buy your book pretty fast. You need further reach.

Marianna had a brilliant suggestion to extend our reach: she proposed that we sell these books at our local homeschool conference in May of 2010. This was especially opportune, because during all those months in which this little booklet was slowly coming together, I had found a treasure trove of old, out-of-print books online and had started printing up copies for the families in our homeschool group. I had a whole collection of books to sell!

Of course, it would be silly to go to all the trouble of marketing these books at the homeschool conference, without using that as a springboard to grow our audience. We needed a website where future customers could find us, and that website, as well as the books themselves, needed branding so that we could build recognition.

Now, ever since I had read St. Augustine’s Confessions back in college, I had developed such a strong affinity toward this saint whom all of us could relate to, a man with normal human failings, a man who could look inside himself and admit that with his life he was saying, “save me, O Lord…but not yet!” And yet this same weak man eventually became not only a saint, but one of the Doctors of the Church. If he could achieve this with God’s grace, that gives hope to us all!

For this reason, when I had begun homeschooling, and had been encouraged to give our home-school a name, without hesitation I had named it St. Augustine Academy. Now I was faced with the need to give a name to our little fledgling publishing company, and again I knew immediately that I wanted his patronage. And since the books I was publishing were mainly ones that would appeal to fellow homeschool families, I simply added “Press” to our homeschool name, and St. Augustine Academy Press was born.

There is more of that story to come, but I will tell it in our next episode, because 2025 marks our 15 year anniversary, and thus we will be highlighting some of the key episodes in the life of St. Augustine Academy Press, and the books we have produced, over the course of this coming year.

I am telling this story now as a way of kicking off that anniversary year with a little sneak peek…and because this book, which predates our founding, is turning 15 this fall…and its illustrator, Erin Bartholomew, is turning 30 this month! So I wanted to put the spotlight on this book, as well as the others she illustrated for us, as a birthday gift to her. All proceeds from the purchase of any of these books during the month of August will be our birthday gift to her.

…and what’s even more exciting is: I just received the news that she has just gotten engaged!  So I am hoping that this gift will help Erin and Dylan, her intended, as they begin their lives together! Please do say a prayer for them if you would!

I will close with some images of the first edition of this book compared to the revised edition we produced in 2016, when Erin updated the illustrations. Enjoy!