The world is changing—drastically, frantically, radically. Mass media is hard-pressed to follow those changes, let alone to anticipate, attack, or address them meaningfully.

Cluny’s media are not new, but old—perhaps the oldest: books.

Our work is the recovery of great books from our past which have been foolishly forgotten, thoughtlessly tossed aside, or even maliciously discarded into the dustbin of history.

As Roman Catholics, our past isn’t particular.

Rather, as Chesterton said, it is sub specie aeternitatis: “The question always is, where in hell are we, or where in heaven are we, or where in purgatory are we. We live in that spaceless, timeless commonwealth and the question is very important.”

Each and every Cluny book represents a particular attempt to answer that timelessly important question of our place in the context of eternity.

Our books tell powerful stories and do their drama full justice. They proclaim the goodness of creation and man’s place in it, and confront the mystery of evil and human malevolence, without shying away.

At their best, they teach us to think, to pray, to love, and they prompt and even demand a better imitation of Jesus Christ.

Re-making these books into beautiful editions is our contribution to keeping the fire of tradition burning, passing its light from our hands to yours and sharing its warmth together, for our good and the good of God’s providential, redeeming plan.

Perhaps. Plato’s story of King Thamus warns that a people accustomed to reading and writing will eventually lose their memories.

Reliance on writing first and then reading will generate a dependence upon things beyond our control and ken and diminish our own sovereign powers. The result: collective amnesia.

But then again, perhaps not. We did, after all, spurn Thamus’s warning, and have been writing and reading our memories for millennia.

And the writing and the reading alike have borne good fruit—fruit that has captured hearts, transformed minds, set souls free; fruit that has lasted through the ages to this present moment.

Literacy is a great gift. Surely it would be a mistake to throw it all away.

We have the choice to prove King Thamus wrong.

To remember, we must read well. To read well, we must set out and seek good books. 

On this adventure, we must be willing to face danger and risk. As Bilbo Baggins says, “It’s a dangerous business, going out of your door; if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.” The same is true for reading. 

The possibility of finding ourselves adrift some place unfamiliar or frightening should not discourage us from the adventure. Rather, it should encourage us. 

We are not made for comfort, but for greatness—as Pope Benedict XVI said. Greatness is attainable only where there is risk.

Reading has its risks, but its rewards are truly great. 

Our name is taken from the French Benedictine monastery of Cluny, founded in 910. Part of Cluny’s work was acquiring, preserving, transcribing, and illuminating books, producing over two centuries one of the richest libraries in the world.

We take inspiration from the “experience of Cluny,” from its example of devotion to the past and love for tradition, set in service to “the things of God” (Pope Benedict XVI).

The monks of Cluny showed the way to walk boldly and faithfully from the present into the future.

It is easy, once we grown discontent with our culture and its history, to condemn them outright and focus on the “Future,” to a time and place in which the healing has not only begun but also completed, wounds are bound up, divisions healed, cups overflow, and so forth.

Or at least we hope so. The future, after all, is unwritten.

But the past is written. There are memories, waiting to be recollected, of what the world, the Church, our civilization, were like before now and what they might yet become again.

Bound up in books, those memories can address that relentless question: “Where did we come from?”

This is no nostalgia trip. We survey and journey into the past on our way toward somewhere else—toward the present and then into the future, armed with answers to the pressing questions of what we are and of where we are going, both in this world and the next.

We hope to make many books into a precious contribution to the cultivation of a properly human, properly literate civilization. A civilization along these lines of St. Paul to the Romans: not conformed to this world but rather reformed in newness of mind, capable of proving what is the good.

Cluny’s editions are restorations. The restorative spirit especially animates the production and design elements of the publishing process.

Every book ever published consists of words that have been written, edited, typeset, designed, and then printed and bound appropriately. Although all our books have already gone through this process at least once in the past, Cluny does it all over again—thus restoring the text to the glory it once enjoyed as a “new” book.

Every Cluny edition begins with the acquisition of the original work, which is then digitized and closely edited, with errata corrected and editorial notes provided as necessary. The manuscript is then freshly typeset, oftentimes in close reference to the original typeface styles, weights, and ornamentation.

Our attention to original works is borne from the belief that any restoration worth its salt is duty-bound to refresh, repair, and reinforce the original construction.

Everyone is told not to judge a book by its cover. A Cluny book is designed with the expectation that everyone will judge that book by its cover.

The whole cover design, from the artwork and color palette to the typefaces and their positioning, should possess its own integrity but also be a harmonious whole with the text it binds.

The hand-copied, meticulously illuminated editions of the monastic age are undeniably the gold standard of literary preservation, Cluny is confident that its methods produce more than just “happy media” which definitely meet the standard of excellence.

Cluny’s work is deeply personal. It is the fruit of the faith we have received and the lives we have chosen.

We want the world that our children grow up and grow old in to be a world where good books are remembered and read.

We believe that this desire is a common one—that parents, grandparents, people of good will, also want this. But we know that our wanting and our willing are in vain, if we do not work.

The work is straightforward: read good books.

We are all readers; the only question is whether we read well; and the determination of our reading well is that we have good books to read.

We believe that Cluny’s “making many books”—our recovery of old, neglected, or forgotten books, our contribution of them to the fascinating, ongoing conversation of the tradition—is important work.

We believe that by making and reading these books, we are satisfying a fundamental human urge. As Peter Bailey says in It’s a Wonderful Life: “It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.”

We believe that those words hold true for reading stories that inform us about where we come from, where we are, and where we are going.

That is the tradition. And that is the work of Cluny.