What the press is for
The Three Registers
Mel in ore, melos in aure, iubilum in corde.Honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, jubilation in the heart.
The press names its work not by the kind of book it makes but by the end that book serves. The phrase is St. Bernard’s, from his fifteenth sermon on the Song of Songs, where he sets the name of Jesus in the mouth, the ear, and the heart. The press reads those three as one movement inward: what is tasted, then what is heard and understood, and at last what is loved, sense opening onto understanding and understanding onto love. It is one motion, not three separate things, and a single book may pass through all of it, as a soul does.
These are not three shelves into which every volume is sorted. They are three ends we hope each volume will reach, in its own measure. Some books lean toward one and some toward another. The best reach toward all three at once.
Mel
Honey in the mouth · the taste
Before a book is read it is seen and held: the weight of the volume, the grain of the page, the cut of the type, the proportion of the margin. This is not ornament added to the book but its first act of meaning, the sweetness on the tongue that draws the reader in. A serious text deserves a serious object. Each volume is set in a classical face, printed to last, and bound to be kept rather than replaced. A book made well tells the reader, before he has read a line, that what he holds was thought worth the labor, and so invites him to think it worth his own.
Melos
Melody in the ear · the hearing
Between the taste and the love stands the understanding: the book as ordered speech, an argument followed, the music of a mind reasoning well. This is the register of the intellect, and the heart of what the press restores, works of philosophy and divinity in which a serious mind has thought carefully and deserves to be read again. The work is to return these neglected books to readers who want them, in editions that are accurate, affordable, and made to last, so that the author is heard clearly, in his own voice, reasoning as he reasoned.
Iubilum
Jubilation in the heart · the love
Taste and understanding are not the end. They are the way to it. The end is iubilum, the joy of the heart, the delight that is no longer about God but in him. St. Bernard says of the name of Jesus that when it is preached it gives light, when meditated it feeds, when invoked it heals, and that every food of the mind is dry unless it is dipped in that oil. A book of divinity that instructs the mind but never warms the heart has done real work and stopped short of its purpose. This is the register of devotion: sermons, meditations, prayers, the manuals of the interior life. It is also the hope that governs every other book the press makes, that a work of philosophy or theology, rightly presented, does not merely inform the reader but moves him, and that the taste and the hearing arrive, at last, at love. It is the register the press cares about most, and the one it can least manufacture. It can only prepare the way.
The three take their emblem from the bee, whose ordered labor gathers sweetness from many flowers and stores it in the comb, the same figure that gives the press its name, and St. Bernard his: Doctor Mellifluus, the honey-flowing doctor.