Our Work

$10 Book of the Month
$10 Book of the Month
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The ALLTA Collection

Reality is wild. And no one should enter the wilderness unread.

Our new collection, ALLTA (from the Gaelic for “wild”), offers carefully designed and beautifully illustrated books in premium, hardbound editions, to inspire wonder in the hearts and minds of young readers. Inaugural volumes now available.

These are not tame books; but they are good.

I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame. A mere unmeaning wilderness is not even impressive. But the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn.” (G. K. Chesterton)


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Our Reason

Ours is an age of deep and oftentimes unwitting forgetfulness.

Yet it is also the information age.

Never have we had access to such immense stacks of knowable material, such copious receipts of past literary efforts and exchanges, such powerful tools to aid us in understanding the universe and our place therein.

Never have we collected so much and remembered so little.

But does it have to stay this way?

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“Of making many books there is no end.”

The Book of Ecclesiastes

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“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

The Fellowship of the Ring

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Just as an individual without memory has lost his identity, so too a human race without memory would lose its identity.

Pope Benedict XVI

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We are like men fighting a fire, desperately keeping at bay, here and there, the flames of unbelief and of social disorder, while we hurriedly rescue all that we have time to rescue.

Ronald Knox

Our Name

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Cover to cover…

A book, from cover to cover, should be an artifact, a work of art.

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It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject, and there must be in it nothing of excess or defect.

Blaise Pascal

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The magic is in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

Ray Bradbury

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A painting begins to become a book at the very moment it uses lines and colors to relate a story, or to describe human emotions, human passions, human thoughts.

Étienne Gilson

Our Technique

The Tradition

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The Men

Cluny is the work of two men: John Emmet Clarke, its editor-in-chief, and Scott W. Thompson, its chief financial and operations officer.

Friends since 2011 and owners of Cluny since 2017, John and Scott are living proof of the words spoken by the guardian angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life: “No man is a failure who has friends.”

Spurred on by that fundamental success, they have established Cluny as a prominent player in the Catholic and independent publishing industries.