Spotlight: The Little Children's Prayer Book

During this, our 15th anniversary year, we have been reminiscing about the early days of St. Augustine Academy Press, and the stories behind many of our books. Last August, we posted the first of these retrospectives as a sort of sneak peek into this 15-year celebration, because that book, Panic in the Pews, predated the official founding of St. Augustine Academy Press by a few months.

 

We also celebrated a big milestone back in November: The 10th birthday of our book Treasure and Tradition. The roots of that book go back even further than Panic in the Pews, because the first version of that book, Learning to Follow the Mass, was the very first book we ever printed and sold, and this opened the door to all the rest.

 

Publishing Learning to Follow the Mass was itself a 4-year odyssey that came to fruition in October 2009. It was while I was working on that book, in Spring of 2008, that I initially hatched the idea of creating Panic in the Pews, and that book also took some time to develop, with the final product arriving in December 2009.

 

During all those years, I was busy homeschooling a growing family, and had become quite active in our local Catholic homeschool group. It was here that I met my dear friend Julie Streeter, whose creative assistance has been indispensable in so many of our books. But it was also through this homeschool group that I met Kathy McCoy, who planted perhaps the biggest seed that would eventually sprout into a full grown publishing company…

 

For many years, Kathy taught a class out of her home to prepare children for their First Confession and First Communion. As I recall from one of my earliest conversations with her, she had given so freely of her time for all those years because her greatest desire was to teach children to see Jesus as their very best Friend, and to develop an authentic relationship with Him that would carry through their entire lives. And I can tell you from my perspective years later, that she truly succeeded in that aim, at least with my children!  I will never forget all the times my children would excitedly ask me if they could go to confession as soon as we arrived for Mass on Sundays.  I wish I had felt that way about confession when I was their age…

 

In January of 2010, having heard about my recent publishing endeavors, Kathy told me she had been thinking about publishing a little book containing the materials and activities she used for her classes, so that others could implement something similar. She asked if I could help her, and I was thrilled to do so. 

 

We began to meet and carefully review the materials that she was using. Many of the poems and readings she gave to the children had sweet illustrations they could color, which obviously came from older books. Unfortunately, she had been teaching this class for so long that, through the continual photocopying process, most of them were blurry and muddy. She no longer had the originals, nor could she remember which books they came from. This was one of the first hurdles I chose to tackle: to find the original illustrations so that we could get nice crisp, clean scans. 

 

Now, Kathy had used two books as cornerstones in her class: First Confession, and The King of the Golden City, both by Mother Mary Loyola. And while the latter had been reprinted with beautiful color illustrations and could easily be obtained from Catholic Heritage Curricula, Kathy had an older version with some interesting black and white illustrations, and it was these which I first set out to find. 

 

Assuming that those illustrations had come from the earliest printed copies of The King of the Golden City, I went looking online to see if I could track down one of these older copies. This sleuthing process led me to The Internet Archive (archive.org). Someone with incredible forethought and wisdom was archiving digital copies of books that libraries were discarding, in order to preserve a crucial part of our heritage. 

 

It was on that website that I first made the discovery that these two books were just the smallest part of a huge body of work by Mother Mary Loyola. I knew nothing at all about her, and had no idea that she had written close to three dozen books! And having fallen in love with The King of the Golden City, I knew I wanted my children to be able to read these others. Of course, I didn’t want them having to stare at a computer screen in order to read them, so I began downloading PDFs of the scanned books, designing simple covers, and using an online print-on-demand service called Lulu to print them.

 

And while this endeavor eventually consumed a growing amount of my time and attention, leading to the full development of a publishing company, I did not cease my search for the elusive books containing these illustrations. Because, while many of Mother Loyola's books were available at The Internet Archive, there was one which I was convinced would be likely to contain lots of great illustrations: The Little Children's Prayer Book. And this one was proving nearly impossible to find. 

 

This prayer book had been quite popular in its day, but books of this nature tend either to stay in families as heirlooms, or to be so well-loved that they wind up in poor condition, and eventually discarded rather than being resold. Extensive searches, including looking for previously sold copies, came up completely empty. So the next major step in tracking it down was the massive library database, WorldCat. Unfortunately, this was scarcely more helpful; very few copies had made their way into libraries either. The only copies I could find were in a library in Ireland, and at Boston College. Alas, the ones in Boston were stored away, not available to the public. I spent months trying everything to cajole the library staff to permit me access to just one of those copies, but in vain. 

 

So it was a huge surprise when suddenly, in May of 2010, I found a copy of this book on eBay, under a slightly different title: The Prayer Book for Children by Mother Loyola. And while I have never discovered why the title was modified in this way, it was nevertheless the book I had been looking for!

 

Sadly, it did not contain any of the illustrations I was looking for, so the search for those continued…but of course, it was a wonderful book, and I lost no time in working towards republishing it. 

 

Now this particular little volume presented a new challenge for me. All the other books I had reprinted so far were common sizes. Learning to Follow the Mass was letter-sized paper, having started its life as pages in a binder. Panic in the Pews was a standard storybook size, 6 inches by 9 inches. And the other books by Mother Mary Loyola that I was beginning to print were all half letter size, which in printer’s lingo is called “digest” size.

 

But most children's prayer books are pocket sized, and this particular one was no different. Sweet and tiny, it measured just 3 by 4.5 inches, and fit easily in the palm of my hand. Small books like this are harder to produce. A lot of mechanical binding machines have a hard time with something that small, so they often have to be bound by hand. The only way to print books like this at a reasonable per-copy cost is to print thousands, and I most certainly did not have the wherewithal for that. I could only afford the method I was currently using: print on demand. And that meant that the smallest size available was 5 in by 8 in. 

 

However, it was right at that time that Lulu was beginning to offer photo books. The good news was that the smallest size was 3.5 by 5.25, which would be perfect! The bad news was that the binding was on the short side, meaning that this book was landscape format, not portrait format. That's a bit unusual for a prayer book. 

 

But it was better than having a prayer book that was too big! So I set out to design the book so that it would work at this size, in landscape format. It was a very difficult challenge! The type had to be quite small, and so did the illustrations. Somehow I made it work. But when I got the printed copies, I was disappointed. You see, these were photo books, so all of the pages had to be created as JPEGs, not PDFs. Many of you may not know the difference in quality between the two when it comes to words printed on paper, but let's just say that JPEGs don't give you the nice crisp outline you expect for text. Yes, it was readable, and they were cute and pocket sized, but they didn't meet our standards…So…We had to go back to the drawing board. 

 

Unwilling to give up, I searched out some short run digital printers. These are just a little different from print-on-demand printers; with the latter, you can order just one copy if you want, but options for paper size and color printing are very limited and can be very expensive. Short run printers require a minimum order quantity of 25 to 100 copies of a book…but while they also use digital printing equipment (as opposed to the bigger offset printing equipment, which is only economical when printing huge batches), they usually can offer more options for color printing, paper sizes, and binding types. I found two companies that could offer me what I was looking for: color printing, a hardcover, and a pocket sized format. So I ordered 25 copies from each printer, and thankfully one of them came through just in time for Christmas in 2010. 

 

Sadly, the response to this book was not as enthusiastic as I had hoped. Not wanting to have to redesign the entire thing, I had retained the landscape format when printing these copies. And while they were beautiful, and the content was wonderful, this format was awkward and unappealing to many.

 

But by this time, I had so many other projects on my plate... Our first books were printed directly from the PDFs I had downloaded from archive.org. These had been produced from scans of the original books, but while some of those scans were very good quality, others were not. At first, I spent countless hours doctoring up the PDFs to improve the final product. But the quality still was not entirely up to snuff, so by 2011, I was learning to retypeset all those books using Adobe InDesign. This brought the quality of our offerings to the next level…and as we began attending more homeschool conferences, our company was beginning to grow. 

 

But requests continued for a version of The Little Children's Prayer Book in a format that was closer to what most people expect—that is, in portrait format. So I finally made the time to do a full redesign, and the new edition hit the presses in November of 2012.

 

It wasn't until after the success of Treasure and Tradition in late 2014/early 2015 that I revisited the design of this book once more. I now had the funds to finally be able to print this book as it deserved, using traditional offset printing. I also had better scans of many of the illustrations I had used in the original.

 

It was at that time that I decided to address another of the frequent requests we had consistently received from parents of boys, wondering if there were any other options for the cover. Many of these sorts of prayer books tend to offer similar yet alternate versions for boys and girls. The cover image we were using was a beautiful painting of a little girl at prayer by the French artist William Adolphe Bouguereau, but we struggled to find a comparable image of a little boy…and besides, printing one book with two different covers would have added significantly to the price. So while I was sad to abandon our beautiful little girl, it seemed wisest to choose a more unisex image for the cover. I chose a painting by Carl Heinrich Bloch depicting Jesus gesturing to a little child, as in the passage in Luke’s Gospel: “Amen I say to you: whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter into it.” 

 

Another upgrade I was excited to add to this volume were the printed endpapers, which reproduce faithfully the beautiful silk endpapers I found in an 1870s breviary by Pustet. It is this final version, printed in fall of 2015, that we currently offer on our website, the fruit of a long journey through the work of Mother Mary Loyola.

 

But that’s not the end of this story…there’s a fun little postlude.  It wasn’t until 2020, when I was working on the Third Magnificat Reader (a collection of stories from pre-1940’s Catholic readers to accompany our Religion in Life Curriculum), that I finally found those illustrations I had been searching for!  They came from the third grade American Cardinal Reader!

 

 

Last but not least, would any of you like to own a little piece of St. Augustine Academy Press memorabilia?  When I was digging through my archive copies of our early books to take photos for this post, I found a whole stack of those very first photobook copies of The Little Children’s Prayer Book. They are so cute, but I sure don’t need a whole stack of them!  The first ten people to email me with your mailing address can have one of these copies for your very own!