About the press
Mellifluous Press exists to turn readers toward the true, the good, and the beautiful, and in doing so to serve the intellectual integrity of Christian orthodoxy. It returns to print neglected books of the past that have sought these things most carefully, and it makes of each a durable and dignified object worth keeping.
The press takes its name from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, called Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing doctor, for the sweetness his hearers found in his preaching. In his fifteenth sermon on the Song of Songs he describes what the name of Jesus works in a soul: it is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, and jubilation in the heart. Mel in ore, melos in aure, iubilum in corde. The saying moves inward, from the senses to the affections: a thing first tasted, then heard and understood, and at last loved. This is the whole conviction of the press, set down as its motto. A good book of divinity is not information about God only. Rightly made and rightly read, it is a means by which something of its subject reaches the reader. The making is not decoration laid over the doctrine but continuous with it, because the God these books concern is himself the source of the beauty, the order, and the truth they carry.
The device of the press is the Speculum Iustitiæ, the Mirror of Justice, a title of the Blessed Virgin, who reflects the holiness of Christ and keeps no light of her own. That is the vocation of a faithful book, and of a faithful press: not to be a light but to be a clean glass that hands on the light entire, adding nothing and hiding nothing. The bee and the honeycomb belong to the same Bernardine root. Where the mirror speaks of faithful reflection, the bee speaks of patient labor: sweetness gathered from many flowers and stored, slowly, in the comb.
The press restores works of philosophy, theology, and devotion that have fallen out of print and out of memory. Each is carefully edited and proofread by hand, and given an introduction. The aim is a reading edition at once trustworthy, beautiful, and made to last, below the price of a critical edition and well above the disposable reprint.
A personal note. Mellifluous Press is, for now, the work of a single hand. It was begun on the feast of St. Bernard, and the day did not feel like an accident: a purpose long held turned of a sudden into resolve, sharpened by the need for careful and human work in an age of careless, machine-made text. It is offered first of all as a labor of love for the good of souls: their instruction, their formation, and their delight. It grows slowly and one volume at a time, in the conviction that a few books made well are worth more than many made in haste.