The following was sent to Cal Catholic by John Riess, one of the founders of Angelico Press.caldecott-beauty-in-the-word-194px-300px1

I started Angelico Press with two colleagues in the fall of 2011. Our combined experience was 35 years in business and law, and 40 years in publishing, so we knew full well what we were getting ourselves into. Publishing is a notoriously difficult industry to succeed in, but we believed current changes in technology and distribution offered tremendous opportunities for a new business model and innovative marketing. We were also interested in forming a loyal community of authors and readers.

The company we created is a virtual one, with editors, proofreaders, graphic artists, marketers, and others working from NYC to Taos, NM, to the UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond. We began as a non-profit dedicated to making the rich tradition of Catholic intellectual, cultural, and spiritual life more available to families, students, and scholars. We intended primarily to reprint works of apologetics, theology, philosophy, political and social thought, spirituality, history, biography, and literature, giving careful attention to choice of titles, elegant book design, and affordable prices; and publishing an extensive selection of inexpensive ebooks to meet burgeoning demand. We felt that too many classics remained out of print, that too many reprinted works were available only in poor-quality editions or sold at unnecessarily high prices, and the demand for ebooks unmet.

ferrara-liberty-the-god-that-failed-203px-300px2Our network of new authors, however, grew rapidly and we found ourselves with submissions of outstanding new works by writers such as Christopher Ferrara, Stratford Caldecott, and Wolfgang Smith. So we began to publish new titles that engaged the modern world in its myriad aspects, such as Chris’s Liberty, the God That Failed, Stratford’s Beauty in the Word, and a new book by James Kalb on diversity. One additional goal we had from the outset was to be not only Catholic but also catholic. We hoped to publish books that offered avenues of insight for both children and adults into the spiritual life, adverting to the fullness of the Church’s tradition in ways not commonly found in the contemporary Catholic world. The mystical, metaphysical, esoteric, and symbolical dimensions of our faith are too little known by many, and yet are the very things so many hunger for. One of the many aims of Angelico Press is to address this situation, within the limits of our modest enterprise. And so we are now developing imprints to accommodate a broader range of subjects. One is devoted to retrieving the vision of a Christian cosmos, with five books by Wolfgang Smith on science and religion, Stratford Caldecott’s All Things Made New and his new work The Radiance of Being, books by Jean Borella, and many others.

We are committed to bringing tradition forward into modernity, without failing to conserve its essence, in an attempt to help till the soil of a new age of evangelization and Christian discipleship. We are likewise committed to serving readers of all stripes, with titles in production ranging from The Divine Comedy as Microcosmos and a work on Thomas Aquinas and the metaphysics of Tolkien, to historical novels and devotional classics such as The Spiritual Maxims of St. Francis de Sales and Gerald Vann’s Seven Swords and The Heart of Man, to children’s books like Joan Windham’s Sixty Saints for Boys and Sixty Saints for Girls and William Kingston’s outstanding The Seven Champions of Christendom. Something for everybody, in lovely editions, at prices nearly all can afford.

To read more about Angelico and/or order books, click here.
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