At long last, the full Prayer Book Studies series is finished and available!!

This has been a very long time in coming.

For those unfamiliar with this material, here’s the blurb I wrote to describe them:

The creation of the landmark 1979 American Book of Common Prayer was the fruit of nearly four decades of discussion within the Episcopal Church. Prayer Book Studies is a series of official reports by the Church’s Standing Liturgical Commission that were published irregularly over the course of that period, representing the work of the committees deliberating over and drafting the materials that would eventually become the 1979 revision. These reports provide an extraordinary window into the work of leading liturgical scholars during an age characterized by huge transformation in the fields of liturgy. Long out of print and unavailable, these reports, collected in nine volumes, are an invaluable resource for liturgical scholars and clergy. 

I originally conceived of this project in early 2018. After some initial discussions and wrangling, an editor I knew at Church Publishing and I hashed out a plan for me to digitize the 29+ soft-cover/pamphlets that constitute the publications leading up to the publication of the Draft Proposed Book of Common Prayer in 1976 before its final ratification as the new American 1979 Book of Common Prayer. She insisted I add in the two later volumes from the late ’80’s I had not been aware of, and so we did.

The fundamental concept was a “diplomatic” edition of the primary source documents. In this context, “diplomatic” means an edition that replicates the format and contents of the original as closely as possible in its new form. Thus typos in the original, changes in formatting between volumes, and such would all be preserved. The idea is that whomever is looking at the new edition will essentially receive the same visual information from the page as an original viewer. This meant after scanning in all of the volumes, doing the OCR work to convert images to text, proofreading it all, and applying html code to structure the result, I also added styling markup to reflect the original as closely as possible.

We put out the First Series, volumes I-XVII, that contained the background academic work before Prayer Book Revision was formally engaged by General Convention as an e-book in January 2020. I’d hoped to get the Second Series, volumes 18-30, finished fairly soon after, but then COVID hit. That completely stalled my progress for a whole variety of reasons including four different job changes in just a few years.

Once things stablized, I got back to it—albeit slowly—and finally got everything finished last year. I reached out to the editors I’d worked with before with the finished draft: no response. Turns out they’d both moved on.

After a bit of emailing around, I was hooked up with some new editors. I had to explain the whole project again–what it is, what I had done, why it was important, etc. I received a heart-stopping reponse that began, “Well, we’ve looked things over… And we’ve decided to go in a different direction…” To my shock, they’d decided not just to do an e-book but also softback and hardback editions!

As great as this was, it did cause a few issues, mostly relating to the original goal of a diplomatic edition. All of the formatting was standardized which caused issues around headings and levels of headings across the 40-year spread of the series; the restoration of footnotes also changed things as I had marked editorial notes differently based on the original formatting of each volume. This didn’t get fully worked out, so you’ll notice a shift in how these appear as you go through the volumes!

All in all, we ended up dividing the full series into 9 separate volumes, with new (and brief) introductions for each. When they initally told me the projected pricing I flipped out; the paperback and digital prices were the same. The whole point of this project was to get these works back into the hands of anyone who wanted them! So, I pushed back and we were able to get the digital price dropped.

Now, at long last, I’m happy to present the new complete edition of the Prayer Book Studies! They’re all listed separately on Amazon, so here’s a link to the first one.

(I’ve also advocated for topical collections that would gather the Eucharist stuff in one volume; the Initiation stuff, the Daily Office stuff, etc.; let me know if that would be something you’d like to see so I can report back interest in that option too!)