So I didn't have a satisfactory specimen for our "before" photos...until a generous reader offered to let us borrow the one she found at a thrift store (Hat tip to Erin!)!

So here are some before-and-after photos of Book Three in the series, which display the state of the originals...great content, but poor print quality, badly browned paper, and unappealing, muddy grey images. The combination of these characteristics made it nearly impossible to reproduce as-is...they needed help.

It took us around two years...Some pages were colorized, others carefully redrawn in Adobe Illustrator...and some simply cleaned up to remove the haze and flecks from the paper background and restored to fill in for deteriorated ink coverage.

Here you can see the covers.  The originals were all red, but we felt this made it difficult to differentiate between the various levels, so we chose to introduce a theme color to each level, starting with the original red and working our way through the rainbow (because no one can steal the rainbow from God...it remains the beautiful symbol of His promise!).  So on top here you actually see the cover of Book One...and Book Three has a yellow cover.

The inside of each cover in the series features a different verse with a black-and-white art background that form part of the instruction at each grade level...

And the interior pages have varied illustrations which we either redrew or colorized to make them more appealing:

And last but not least, there's the back cover, where we replaced the original publisher's logo with our new art logo...

The books in this series were a labor of love and we hope they will go far in revitalizing the teaching of this subject in the Catholic sphere!  Please help spread the word!

Now, after 15 years as an erstwhile publisher, I often look back and laugh at how many times, while frantically seeking one very specific thing, I would uncover a breadcrumb trail leading to another. The search for this Victorian Catechisme en Images led me to an earlier publication by that same name. And I fell in love with its sumptuous engravings.

I began researching it. Published in 1861, it had received wide acclamation from the secular art world despite its unabashed Catholicism. Unlike the fussy complication of the late Victorian volume I had been seeking, each page contained one simple yet exquisite illustration that sought to firmly plant each basic teaching of the Catechism into a scriptural framework. This graphical encapsulation of the Creed and Commandments, the fundamental prayers of the Church, and the Virtues and Works of Mercy, sought to meet the needs of a largely illiterate population…and since it could be printed economically, it was made widely available. I sought to do the same.

I spent countless hours in Photoshop, carefully restoring each of its 112 illustrations and pairing them with other graphic elements from books of a similar period to create a more coherent visual layout. A friend helped me translate the French text, and I even found an English version in the University of Notre Dame library which helped me to rearrange the somewhat disorganized topics in the French version into a more streamlined volume.

We initially produced the final synthesis in December of 2015 as a paperback volume that I hoped could double as a coloring book. But our customer feedback told us that these engravings deserved better treatment, so in late 2016 we reprinted A Pictorial Catechism with a hard cover.

However... it was while I was feverishly working to prepare that first paperback version, that I happened to come across what quickly became perhaps my favorite of all our books. I love telling this story, because it is so comically indicative of how God often has me literally trip over things He wants me to reprint. First He thwarted my search for that gorgeous lithograph Catechism and replaced it with something more suited to my capabilities…then He threw something at me from completely out of left field.

I happened to be perusing eBay one day, looking for something that wasn't even related to books. But as many of you are well aware, most selling platforms like eBay know perfectly well what you most often look for, and at the bottom of each search page, it provides items “suggested for you.” That day an item in that panoply happened to catch my eye: a book entitled “An Alphabet of the Altar.” Well, that sounded interesting…so I clicked on the link.

I nearly fell off my chair when I saw images of the pages inside this book. I think I probably would have paid any asking price, no matter how unreasonable. All I wanted to know was how soon I could have this incredible treasure in my hands, and get it back in print.

And fortunately, An Alphabet of the Altar and its frothy, exuberant illustrations were in exceptional condition and needed very little cleanup and restoration. There was no text that needed type setting, no complicated research had to be done in order to rebuild it…the only slightly complicated thing I did (besides creating a pastiche with one of the interior illustrations for the foil stamping on the cover) was to match the ink color with the original. It may have originally been black, but it had faded to a scrumptious chocolate brown which I chose to retain, along with a creamy thick ivory paper. What a luscious confection this book is! And it has been no surprise that our customers have devoured it.

And now you have a chance to win a copy of both books! To enter our giveaway, simply follow our Instagram profile @staugustineacademypress, like our Tale of Two Pictorials giveaway post, and tag three friends in the comment section! This giveaway is open to US Residents (we love our international customers, but sadly overseas shipping has grown prohibitively expensive!) and will close this Friday, June 14th at 11:59 PM Central Time. 

Though it was far from being the first book I published, I nevertheless consider The King of the Golden City to have been the seed from which St Augustine Academy Press was born.

This assertion requires some explanation…

Hopefully, by now, you have read our previous retrospectives, narrating the early history of the Press, beginning with the little booklets I used to make for my children, which grew into Learning to Follow the Mass, Panic in the Pews, Treasure and Tradition, and the Little Children's Prayer Book. 

But I think I can say truthfully that what made the difference between creating a few books that probably wouldn't have garnered much interest, and building an entire publishing company, was the discovery of the work of Mother Mary Loyola…and that would not have happened without Kathy McCoy and the book she used to prepare my children for their first communion: The King of the Golden City.

This isn't meant to be an advertisement for that book, so I won't delve into how incredible that story is, and how deeply it has affected my family's faith and spirituality. I’ll stick to the facts, beginning with the fact that this book was the ultimate rabbit hole for me…

In our last episode, I told the story of Kathy McCoy’s First Communion class, and how that led to my discovery of the corpus of works by the same author as The King of the Golden City. That authorship alone was all the recommendation necessary…I knew I wanted copies of those books on my shelves…and it stood to reason that others would want the same…so I began the work of reprinting them.

However, I still remember the first time Kathy showed me the gorgeous copy she owned of the original 1921 version of this book. I recognized the watercolor illustrations which had been faithfully reprinted in the newer paperback version our family owned. But in addition to those illustrations, each page of this book was beautifully framed with a border in green ink that contained elements with a Eucharistic theme. I remember thinking to myself: how incredible would it be to create an exact reprint of this book! But that dream seemed far too ambitious. I had learned just enough by that point to know how much it cost to print books in color…and there was no way my budget could stretch that far. 

Nor did it seem a worthwhile investment of time…after all, I had an entire stack of books waiting to be resurrected, while this story had been republished by several different people over the years. Besides the version our family owned, published by Little Way Press in 2004, there was the edition created by Janet Marie Hartley and Little Flower Press in 1996 (reprinted in 1998 with hand-drawn illustrations). Theresa Johnson at Catholic Heritage Curricula had printed a black and white version of the book in 1997 (this is the one containing those mysterious illustrations I sought for a long time…see our last episode for that story…I never did find where they came from, even after reaching out to Theresa to ask about the history of this book). And in 2007, yet another version had been published by Janet McKenzie of Race for Heaven.  So…there seemed to be more than enough copies on the market.

However, I have never been content merely to reprint the books that I find. I don't know about you, but when I pick up a book, very often knowing something about its author can make all the difference in whether I will bother to open the cover. Whether it's Scott Hahn or Stephen King, JRR Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson, knowing about the author establishes a sense of credibility. Besides, I'm insatiably curious…and I was dying to know more about the author who had penned this beloved story.

So it was not merely disappointing, it was downright puzzling when I reached out to the Bar Convent in York, where Mother Mary Loyola spent most of her life, and received a brief reply with a single page about her life. Unfortunately, they had little information on her, and even less interest. 

I was forced to begin sleuthing myself. Thus, beginning in the fall of 2010, I began using Ancestry.com and other online resources, and over the course of a few years I managed to uncover an enormous amount of information about her family, even managing to locate living relatives, as well as other researchers with similar interests. Mother Loyola and her family had so many connections among well-known personages of their era that my research seemed to expand infinitely. One bread crumb trail would lead to another, and another…it was honestly amazing how things unfolded. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a number of helpful archivists, as well as those family members who shared a great deal with me. 

But there was also much that could not be accessed online. The Jesuit Archives in London had a folder full of correspondence between Mother Loyola and her editor, Father Herbert Thurston. The archives of the Venerable English College in Rome held several letters concerning her that had been written by her cousin, who happened to have been Rector there in the late 19th century. And there were stacks of family photos belonging to relatives… All of these required a personal visit to peruse.

It wasn't until 2015, in the wake of the success of Treasure and Tradition, that I was able to ultimately realize these two important dreams in my pursuit of Mother Mary Loyola: First, I was finally able to gather enough funds to make the trip to Rome, London and York, visit the archives and meet Mother Loyola's relatives. That was a truly incredible trip…

And second, I was finally able to afford to create the beautiful replica reprint of the original hardcover version of The King of the Golden City–something I had considered almost impossible five years before. This was a huge milestone for me! It was sort of like coming full circle…

And while my research into Mother Mary Loyola has sadly gathered dust in recent years, as more important projects are constantly taking precedence, the Special Centenary Edition of this beautiful book–the book that planted a seed that grew into a publishing company–is still something I'm so proud of.

This was actually the first time I set out to create a replica version of an original book. Honestly, it was the first I had encountered that merited the painstaking effort; up to that point, most of the originals I had reprinted were much simpler. Of course, since all of this took place years before this blog began, I was never able to assemble what has since become my favorite feature: a before-and-after post! So–10 years later–here are some fun comparison photos showing my first efforts at creating a faithful replica of an original book!

**Postlude**

As part of my continuing research into the life of Mother Mary Loyola, and efforts to republish all of her works, I have also hunted down copies of her books in other languages. In 2017, I found a copy of The King of the Golden City in French from 1926, and discovered that there were actually two different versions: one for girls, and one for boys…and they had charming black and white line illustrations to match. 

So in addition to reprinting that French edition (and using its illustrations to create a Spanish translation), I was finally able to solve a long-standing problem: parents of boys had frequently bemoaned the fact that their sons were unable to evince interest in this wonderful story, because the main character was…a girl!!!

Tongue in cheek aside, I have sons of my own, so I understood this quandary…but despite suggestions that I create a version for boys, I had always balked at making such significant changes to the original story. It wasn't just a matter of changing names; some of the episodes involved other girl characters, and girly things like clothes and jewelry. This would require extensive rewriting. But now there was a clear and time-tested means of making these modifications! Assuming that the adaptations in the French version had been approved, if not by Mother Loyola herself (she was still alive at the time), then at least by the publishers of that era, I now felt confident in making those same adaptations to the English version. And that was how I created our Special Edition for Boys.

Thus, at present, we offer the original hardcover Centenary Edition, the Special Edition for Boys, and editions in Spanish, French and Italian. Moreover, I have an original copy of King of the Golden City in Dutch (see the photo to the right), which is almost as lovely as the original in English, but I am unsure whether there is enough interest to make it worthwhile to reprint that… But I would love to see this book printed in many different languages!

But now I have some more fun news: as part of our 15th year anniversary celebration, we will be doing another giveaway this month. One lucky winner will receive a free copy of our beautiful hardcover Centenary Edition of The King of the Golden City! 

To enter, simply follow our Instagram profile @staugustineacademypress, like our King of the Golden City giveaway post, and tag three friends in the comment section! This giveaway is open to US Residents (we love our international customers, but sadly overseas shipping has grown prohibitively expensive!) and will close this Friday, April 11th at 11:59 PM Central Time.

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!

(Thanks to all of you for your interest in this little giveaway...all the copies have now found new homes!)

Once upon a time, there was a little family. When they would go to Mass on Sunday, there was a spacious room at the back of the church, where the little children had freedom to run and play and color without disturbing the rest of the congregation. The church even offered a little class for the children to attend during Mass. These things were a great comfort to the parents, because with three young children and another on the way, it was very hard sometimes to coax them to sit still and be quiet during all that time.

And all seemed well.

But doubt and worry began to grow in the heart of the little mother. These helpful distractions were not helping the little children to learn how to be reverent at Mass; indeed, the opposite was true. Mass was not worship but playtime, and attempts to help them grow into some degree of participation brought only frustration and despair. Worse, the children were getting older, and wondering why they needed to dress nicely, when so many of the people they saw were wearing things like ripped jeans and death metal t-shirts, daisy dukes and even swimwear.

Perhaps if we attended Mass at another parish, that might improve things? the little mother wondered. And so they became pilgrims, going from one church to another, trying to find a place that would foster the sort of reverence at Mass that the parents recalled from their childhood. But at each parish they attended, they found different versions of the same problem. This little mother bird flew far and wide, but found no suitable place to nest with her young.

It was only then that she remembered a conversation she had overheard many, many years ago…acquaintances who had told her of something unusual: a Mass they had attended according to the ancient Rite, in Latin. At the time, she hadn’t been curious enough to join them, but now she decided to give it a try.

In the frigid darkness of one January morning, shortly after a new little boy had been born to them, the little mother made her way to a small chapel to experience this Mass of Ages. And here she experienced something far beyond anything she had dreamed of. This was not merely a place where her children could grow in virtue; here even her own hunger for closeness to God was fed for the first time, in ways she had never known before. It was love at first sight.

But bringing the whole family to this little chapel proved very difficult. These little children had not yet known what it was to be still and quiet during Mass, and the older ones were curious about every little thing. The peacefulness of the little chapel was disrupted by their chatter. And though some tried to help the little family, others struggled to find patience for these neophytes.

Desperate to help her children, the little mother went through stacks of books intended for children attending the Traditional Latin Mass. But all of them came from an era when this Mass was normal; they did not explain what was unfamiliar to the little family. After all, to their authors, these things were not unfamiliar. And though the little chapel had made little binders for the children with pictures and prayers, they were only in English. How could the little children match up these prayers with the Latin being spoken by the priest? How could they hope to follow along?

So the little mother began putting together her own little binder for the children, using the same images, but finding a text of the Mass in Latin that had English subtitles. Using her own father's old hand Missal, she added as many helpful notes as possible, explaining what the priest was doing at each stage. It was hard to find time; her children needed much attention, and in the meantime, another little girl was born. During the summers, while her older children took swimming lessons, and the littlest ones played on the playground, she sat at a picnic table nearby and slowly and painstakingly created one page at a time to add to the little binder.

Other families saw what she had made and asked for copies. So she decided to upload those pages to Lulu.com. From there, her friends could choose to either download the pages and print them themselves, or they could pay to have a copy printed and nicely bound as a book. And so the book Learning to Follow the Mass was born.

The idea of being able to create her own books opened new doors, and the little mother now began reprinting all sorts of wonderful out-of-print books she had found online. With the help of a friend, she even made her own fun little book on how NOT to behave at Mass.

Before she knew it, this little endeavor, which had come from simply trying to help her children learn to be reverent at Mass, had become a little publishing company, and she found herself proudly displaying her wares at the local homeschool conference in May of 2010.

She trembled a little when a priest came and picked up her book about the Mass and began paging through it. His face looked very serious. “Did you make this book?” he finally asked. The little mother nodded hesitantly. “This is good,” he said. She smiled. “But it needs to be better!” he continued…and her face fell.

This priest happened to be the head of a prominent Catholic publishing company. She sat amazed as he excitedly told her he would set up a meeting for her with his editor-in-chief, who would help her make this little book what it really deserved to be.

Now, the little mother was immensely grateful for this offer of help, but she was also…well…a little overwhelmed! She was expecting her 6th child any day, and it had been a very difficult pregnancy. With five little ones already, all under the age of 10, both time and energy were increasingly hard to find.

But she faithfully met with the editor-in-chief. He showed her books like Fulton Sheen's This is The Mass and encouraged her to make this a beautiful book anyone could proudly display on their coffee table. She would need better software to create the book. And most importantly, he urged her to arrange her own photo shoot, so that with beautiful modern photos, this book would show the world that this Mass isn't just an antique from the past to be admired, it's something dynamic that is relevant today and always.

This was a bridge too far; the little mother began to feel dizzy. How could she, just a little mother, make such an important book? Learn to use expensive, complicated publishing software? Arrange a photo shoot? Couldn't they just take the book and do it themselves? Somehow the little mother hid her fear until the meeting ended, but she sat a long time in her car afterward, shedding tears. Surely this was beyond her power to achieve…

Just a few days later, a sweet little boy was born, and so for a time, she had other cares. But those images and those words never left her mind. Again and again they echoed:

“This is good… But it needs to be better!”

“It must be beautiful so that people will be proud to display it on their coffee table.”

“It should have new photographs to show that this Mass is not just something from the past, it is happening now.”

Meanwhile, her children were getting older, and continued to ask many good questions about what they were seeing at Mass. Each time a question arose, she made a little note of it….

In fact, merely to satisfy her own curiosity, she had collected a number of very good books about the Mass. She began keeping a notebook: on the right hand page, she put the text for each prayer of the Mass. Then on the left hand page, she would write any notes she found in those books on the Mass that applied to that prayer, or group of prayers. And for each page, she strove to find a quote from scripture that was relevant to that part of the Mass.

Inspired by her children's books by Dorling Kindersley, and by the helpful way that MTV's Pop-Up Videos could share interesting trivia without interrupting the flow of a song (yes, it's true, she came from a generation that was raised on MTV), she began organizing her notes into succinct phrases, attached to visual cues, which could make the information memorable and easy to read.

At every turn, God provided. Her sister, who had worked several years for a textbook publisher, gave her very helpful advice, including the idea of organizing all those "pop up" notes in a neat little column that would appear on each page (as you can see in the photo of an early draft at the left, they were originally all over the page...). A good friend with graphic design experience generously taught her how to use all that complicated software. This same friend also helped develop little sketches showing the position of the priest and the servers at the altar to match with every page. (These also served as the illustrations for the unique chart of placefinders the little mother called “bookmarks,” because they were little cues that helped you find your place when you inevitably got lost during all those silent prayers.)  She met a good and kind priest who offered to help vet her little book, to ensure that there were no errors...

Slowly, slowly, little by little, the book grew and developed. Sometimes she would rush home from Mass to jot down yet another idea or insight. Other times, the book would wait for months while life intervened. But finally, after 4 years, she had completed enough to submit it to the diocesan censor, hoping for an imprimatur for this little book. Some dear friends even helped her get advance copies into the hands of influential people who could recommend the book to the public once it was finished.

However, one thing had continued to elude her. She had found a friend, a talented photographer, who was willing to take those beautiful photos of the Mass, but she could find no priest who celebrated the Traditional Latin Mass, who had the hours of time needed for a good photo shoot. They were simply too busy! She had no choice but to insert some sample photos into the book she had submitted to the diocese.

So when the diocesan censor called with a few questions, and asked what her plan was for the final photos, she expressed her sad frustration.

“You can take the photos at my church!” he offered. “My parochial vicar celebrates the Latin Mass, and I'm sure he'd be happy to pose for the photos.” The little mother could hardly believe her ears. God had finally provided this last piece, at the last minute, in the most unexpected way!

And so just a few weeks later, the diocesan censor himself graciously posed for those photos, since the parochial vicar was not available that day. Two friends offered their sons, who had served the Latin Mass many times, to pose alongside him. Alas, since the original altar in this lovely little church had been cut down to a smaller size in order to accommodate a freestanding altar, it was too small to be used as it once was. No problem; with some creativity, the freestanding altar was adorned appropriately for an ad orientem Mass…and this hiccup only added to the helpfulness of the book, because it showed that this Mass can be celebrated in any church with a consecrated altar. (Well...the Mass can even be celebrated on the hood of a Jeep if necessary...)

The friends she had made at the Catholic publishing company helped the little mother find a good local printer who could help make the beautiful coffee table book a reality. It was a huge investment, because unlike the other books she had printed online, this sort of book could only be printed by the thousands. But money wasn't the only problem…

“Where do you plan to store all of these books once they are printed?” the printer asked.

The little mother hadn't thought of that…

“Well…I guess…in our garage?” she answered.

He shook his head. “Tell you what, we have a little bit of warehouse space in the back. We will store them for you, and you can come get as many boxes as you want anytime you need.”

Yes, truly God provided everything necessary.

And so, on Thursday, November 20th, 2014, an article appeared on the website New Liturgical Movement, written by Peter Kwasniewski, introducing the book Treasure and Tradition for the first time. Within minutes, orders started pouring in, as well as emails from people overseas who were having trouble placing their orders…a problem the little mother had never expected...

Those little children, who had long since become accustomed to attending the Latin Mass, and who by now were old enough to help out, set up a little assembly line, and for several days they packed hundreds of orders, while their little mother began searching for distributors in the UK and Australia who could help make this book accessible in those countries.

Then just a few months later, she got another big surprise, when a gentleman from Brazil asked for permission to translate her book into Portuguese!

This little mother thought her little book might help other little families like hers to attend the Latin Mass without all the struggles they had had to undergo. But she was so little. She expected it would take years and years to sell all those 3,000 copies that had taken quite a sacrifice to print.

Instead they were gone in a matter of 3 months! 

So that kind and generous printer helped her to print (and store) more books, and many, many others, before his unexpected passing in 2020 (in your charity, please pray for the repose of his soul). The success of Treasure and Tradition allowed the little mother to invest in creating beautiful replicas of books that she loved, which had been beyond her reach before. And now, 10 years later, Treasure and Tradition has been translated into six languages (with three more on the way), has sold (or given away) more than 80,000 copies, and St. Augustine Academy Press has been able to bring back nearly 200 out-of-print classics for Catholic families like hers.

And the little mother never failed to be grateful to God, and to all her dear friends who had made it all possible.  May God bless them all, every one...

Cast of Characters:

The Publisher Priest: Father James Socias

The Prominent Catholic Publishing Company: Midwest Theological Forum

The Editor-in-Chief: Jeff Cole

Her Sister: Lara Davenport

The Good Friend and Graphic Designer: Julie Streeter

The Good and Kind Priest: Father Sean Kopcynski

The Friend who gave a copy to Cardinal Burke: Mary Popp of SPORCH

The Friend who helped put a copy in the hands of Father Z: Father Joshua Caswell

The Photographer: Laura Dominick

The Diocesan Censor: Father John Balluff

The Servers: Tommy Higgins and Brandon Santiago

The Friend working for the publishing company: Laura Ehrhardt

The Kind and Generous Printer: Mike Gardner

The Foreign Distributors: Cenacle UK, Freedom Publishing Australia

The Brazilian Gentleman: Nestor Forster, Jr.

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!

Here is our latest, Loving and Giving by Clare Dawson!  What a wonderful book!  A hat tip to the reader who clued us in to the existence of this little gem.

In this case, we didn't change much, but we did retypeset the existing text and move to a slightly larger page size so that we could enlarge the beautiful illustrations!

So here are some photos so that you can compare the slight differences...and I hope you will agree it was worth the improvements!

You can see the slight difference in the cover size...

And we had to sneak that barcode in on the back, but I hope you will agree we were able to do it relatively unobtrusively...we carefully nudged the graphics around just a little so that we didn't need to cover any of the illustrations...

I'm not sure how well you can tell the difference in the size of these illustrations, but they take up much more of the page and you can really see the details better...

It's especially notable on this page on the right side.  There was a beautiful little illustration of the Presentation in the Temple, but it was so small you could scarcely see it or read the words...Here it is much larger so that you can enjoy it!  

You can also see on this page the slight difference we made to the lettering in the title, so that it's a little more readable.

So there you have it, folks!  We hope you enjoy this beautiful book.  We were dismayed when it came time to print it, that printing prices are going up significantly.  So we had to price this book higher than we'd like.  But I hope you will find that it really is worth the trouble.

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)!

I'll start with Saint Nicholas first...I love the rich red and blue of this book!  We worked hard to capture the boldness of those colors, and I think we achieved that!

Next is Saint Francis.  Here we were working against ink that may have faded over the years...or maybe when they chose the colors, they chose ones that looked well together...but the brown reads too much like orange, leaving the contrast in many of the illustrations to strain the eye a bit. I didn't want to lose the warmth of the brown, but it needed to be darker in order to keep the color balance in a range that is easier on the eye.  So you will notice the color difference...we moved from cinnamon to chocolate...but I hope you will agree that the darker brown reads much better.

And last but certainly not least, we have the book of the Blessed Virgin.  This one took the most time and care.  As mentioned in our previous post, we were not especially happy with the color choices in this book. It was the first of the three to be printed, and I think they wanted to vary the colors to add interest and beauty.  A fitting goal in a book for Our Lady.  But...again, whether time affected the colors, or they just made some unfortunate choices, the final effect of some of these colors is...erm...well, see for yourself.  We loved the fresh bright seafoam green and blue of the cover, so we made the choice to move all the illustrations to those colors, and I don't regret that decision one bit.  

Here are the endpapers...

Some of the pages retained that lovely seafoam...

But this bubblegum pink just wasn't doing it for me...

Same with this peachy yellow...it was ok but it didn't match nicely with the blue lines...

And...I don't really know what to call this color...it seemed in some ways appropriate for the subject here, because it's quite a dreary shade. But I didn't find it necessary to keep this ugly color just for this page...

So there you have it! If you and your children enjoy these books even half as much as we enjoyed creating them, then that will be very much indeed!

There were some really beautiful illustrations that I found there, which as usual presented a breadcrumb trail that I followed to obtain the book that was the source of the illustrations…only it led me not to a single book, but a trilogy published in the late 1920s in France, written and illustrated by Pierre Noury and his wife Genevieve. This wonderful story of St. Nicholas had a brother and a sister: the story of St Francis, and the life of the Blessed Virgin.

I knew I wanted to republish them, but much work had to be done. The graphics, though beautiful, needed a lot of restoration and color correction. For while the illustrations I loved from the book on St. Nicholas portrayed that great saint boldly all in blue and red, those in the story of Our Lady had many different colors…and not all of them were good choices. Bubblegum pink, a tired, faded yellow and a muddy brownish mauve were most unfortunate pairings with the blue brushstrokes.  Whereas the cover and those pages featuring a pale seafoam green brought a feel of such sweet freshness you could almost smell it…and we knew these were just right to convey the story of the Mother of God. Of course, the work involved in making this change was no small feat, but it was definitely worth the trouble. It is a fitting gift to Our Lady.

However, in this case, there was a more pressing need than just the illustrations: the stories had to be translated. A dear friend of mine, a native French speaker, agreed to help me render them into simple English. Then together we went over these translations once a week, she reading me the original French in her wonderful accent, explaining to me the shades of meaning and poetic sense that was now missing in the English rendering.  Thus we pored over each phrase on each page, finessing the English until it recaptured the beauty of the language found in the original.

That was how we started anyway... But as we worked our way through, we found it to be increasingly difficult. Languages are so complex! They are so much more than just a collection of words! They are a tapestry of imagery, idiom, tone, allusion, fact, charm, persuasion, energy, rhythm… We found ourselves needing to adjust all of these characteristics as we sought to render the pages into English, which has a different style, different expectations. The declarative tone of the French sounded terribly sweet to my friend’s ear, but this did not carry over into English, where it sounded stilted and condescending. We finally gave ourselves permission to make alterations as necessary, choosing to emphasize the importance of an alluring poetic tone bolstered by accurate details, over slavish adherence to the original story construction.

In order to achieve this, it was necessary to research the details of each and every legend, so that when we sought to recapture the magic in English, we weren't inadvertently altering the facts. These tales were quite brief, and we often thought we understood the story, only to find that the truth was quite different.

In the book of the Blessed Virgin, the solution was simple: we opted to use the language of scripture wherever possible. I had recourse once more to the St. Nicholas Center and all of their many resources for help with that book. And with the assistance of a few friends, we discovered several wonderful primary and secondary sources for details on the life of St. Francis.

Though the process was truly delightful, it was very time-consuming. Some days we were lucky to get through a single page, and some weeks our schedule was too busy to collaborate. Thus with over 100 pages to translate, the work has continued little by little over the course of the past several years. Our joy upon finishing the last page was tremendous, though mixed with a little sadness, since it has been such a gift to work together on this monumental task. But we wanted to make sure it was complete in time for you to enjoy it this Christmas!  In fact, we hope to have theses books in hand in time to get them to you for St. Nicholas' feast day on December 6th.

So the first thing you may notice when you finally read these is that the language is far above the average child’s reading level. But have no fear! After all, we specialize in printing and recreating books that are steeped in beauty, because this is what feeds the soul, whether it is a child’s or an adult’s. Many of the stories we publish are woven with complex language. But they are perfect for children, for the same reason that we read them complicated poetry even when they are young. Those patterns of language go deep into their minds and create a sense of the transcendent. Yes, these will most likely be read-aloud books…but just wait…the more they hear these stories and fall in love with them, they will surprise you as they learn the words and inhale the poetry.

As always, I hope you will love these books as much as I do. And I look forward to posting photos soon for my favorite feature: Before-and-after!!!