For the Love of Belloc

Whether you're a long-time lover of Belloc or haven't had the pleasure of making his acquaintance, all the new editions are a cause for rejoicing

My friend Naresh recently acquired these historic items at auction: a photo of Belloc and a hitherto unknown sonnet

Note to Readers

Being out of the country on pilgrimage for two weeks, it would be impossible to prepare the usual Weekly Roundup. This will resume on February 21. For this week and next, I will run book-related features — today’s on Belloc, next week’s on a wide variety of books recently read or received.)

The joys of a local bookshop

Ever since high school, I’ve been reading the works of Hilaire Belloc. The peak period for me was between the ages of about 16 and 24. This was partly the result of an accident. Although born in Chicago, I grew up in New Jersey, in a town called Madison, but in that town we had the greatest used bookstore I’ve ever known, oddly enough called The Chatham Bookseller, even though Chatham is the next town over. The store is still there and still operating:

I used to love to go in there. The owner at the time (in the 1980s) almost always had opera playing in the background, though occasionally there would be Handel or Mozart. His successor also kept the classical music going. It was cram-jammed with books in every place, many of them old, musty, and handsome. And the prices were ridiculously low, usually $1.50 to $3.00 for a hardcover in good shape. When I entered my bookworm phase in high school, I could be seen on a regular basis hauling home heavy bags of literature. My parents were very tolerant of this spending habit, no doubt because it didn’t seem especially dangerous. That isn’t, of course, necessarily true; bad books are worse than any other scourge on earth. But most of what I read was actually quite good and profitable, and at least I wasn’t getting into trouble in any obvious way.

One day, I went into the bookstore, turned a few corners in the labyrinth, and suddenly stopped short, gasping in disbelief. There, in front of my eyes, was a solid two bookshelves’ worth of American first editions of Hilaire Belloc biographics and histories, in their textured or linen hardcovers.

Someone had recently passed away and one of his relatives had brought a ton of his books over, including the Bellociana. Needless to say, I scooped up all those books on the spot and went home hollerin’ like a warrior with scalps. And I plopped down in my plaid-patterned easy chair in my bedroom and devoured them, one after the other, over the next few months.

You see, Belloc is a hugely enjoyable author to read. He’s not always right (for one thing, he was too much of a republican and not enough of a monarchist), but he’s always vigorous, thought-provoking, and entertaining. One learns a lot spending time with him, not just about the immediate subject matter, but about humanity, the world, life, love, suffering, greatness. He is an intensely poetic author (I use this term in the broad sense in which John Senior would use it): his work is suffused with deep feeling and life experience as well as flashes of wit and currents of wisdom.

This is why I continue to recommend that everyone should read some Belloc. He’s “Required Reading,” part of that early 20th-century renaissance in Catholic arts and letters that might have continued longer if the superficiality of the 1950s and the hippy rebellions of the 1960s had not bumped it entirely off the rails.

Many years later, in a slightly daft mood, I decided to sell these volumes, thinking “I’ve read them, and, as much as I enjoyed them, I have no plans to take them up again.” You see, the house I’m living in has a severe shelf-space shortage, which means books are piled on top of books, lying on the tops of bookcases, in drawers, in boxes in the garage, and anywhere else they can be jammed out of sight, but still the books come in, because I write my own books, and edit other people’s books, and regularly submit endorsements for back covers — and all this brings the mailman, the Amazon man, the FedEx man, the UPS man, and the DHL man regularly to my door.

Having purged my Bellociana, some time passed before the full horror dawned on me: Most of these works have never been reprinted. And those that have been reprinted tend to be poor in quality — ugly cover designs, clumsy layout, a crummy OCR printed in a sans serif font, that sort of thing. Your choice often comes down to a crummy edition, an interlibrary loan, or a used hardcover at a Wall Street price. I could have kicked myself for allowing considerations of space to prevail over considerations of time.

Happily, things are beginning to change on the Belloc front, and I am here to tell you about it.

Three Matching Reprints

I will begin with the first half of the good news. Some time ago Julian and I agreed that Os Justi Press should boost its catalog with some of the finest works Belloc ever wrote. So we decided to bring out matching editions of The Path to Rome, The Cruise of the ‘Nona’, and The Four Men (the last of which I am announcing for the first time right here, right now!).

For all three, the interiors are newly typeset in an elegant, old-fashioned style, and with all of Belloc’s original illustrations:

From "The Path to Rome"

From "The Four Men"

Partnering with Mysterium Press

The second half of good news is that Os Justi is now partnering with a new British publisher, Mysterium Press, which describes its mission as follows:

The company launched with reprints of two of Hilaire Belloc’s historical biographies, Wolsey and Cranmer (both long out of print), which are part of a planned series of six books by Belloc on pivotal English figures. We aim to produce truly beautiful editions of both out-of-print and newly commissioned works, encompassing theology, philosophy, history, art, poetry, and fiction.

Os Justi Press is the official and exclusive US distributor for Mysterium Press. The Wolsey and Cranmer books are indeed very beautifully printed.

The well-known Belloc biographer Joseph Pearce is one who rejoices in this spate of new books. In an article at the Imaginative Conservative entitled “A Belloc Revival,” he writes:

Now, at last, we are beginning to see the beginning of a Belloc revival. This has been made manifest to me personally by the number of requests that I’m receiving to write forewords to new editions of Belloc’s works. I’ve written forewords to both the Ignatius Press and Os Justi Press editions of The Path to Rome, the latter of which was published this year, and have also penned the foreword to the Os Justi Press edition of The Cruise of the Nona, published last year…. This year the monks at Silverstream Priory in Ireland asked me to write the foreword to the Cenacle Press edition of Belloc’s fine volume, Essays of a Catholic.

A new publishing house in England, Mysterium Press, has just published very handsome new hardcover editions of two of Belloc’s historical biographies, Wolsey and Cranmer, the latter of which had been scandalously out of print for over half a century. These two titles, published earlier this month and therefore hot off the press, are intended to be the initial releases in an array of further Belloc books. There are plans to publish new editions of other historical biographies, including Charles the First, Cromwell, The Last Rally: A Study of Charles II, and James the Second.

All five of these books may be ordered directly from Os Justi Press, which is having a special 2-day sale (today and tomorrow):

Buy any Belloc book — and get 15% off any other Belloc books in your cart!

Here’s a screenshot of the Language & Literature category, where, if you scroll, you’ll find the books you’re looking for:

I hope many new readers will have the joy of discovering Belloc for the first time, or rediscovering the value of his work if it’s been too long since they last set eyes upon it.

ADDENDUM

For those who may prefer listening/watching or who may wish to share it with others in this format, I have prepared a video in which I introduce, read, and then comment on Gregory DiPippo’s five-part series at NLM refuting Dr. Brant Pitre’s tendentious history of active participation in the Mass (basically, Tridentine = unfortunate mistake, Novus Ordo = restoration of golden age). Here it is:

Thanks for reading and may God bless you!