Well, here we are. Announcing the launch of Creed & Culture.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

 

Not that Substack is scary. But the reason this Substack exists—that’s a little frightening. From the moment Byron Smith approached me about launching a new publishing house called Creed & Culture, not a day has gone by without my thinking of the hoary joke: “How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Start with a large fortune.”

 

From 2000 to 2008, I had the privilege of being an editor at, and ultimately running, ISI Books. It was hard to get the enterprise to pencil, financially, but it was fun. Oh, was it fun! Gratifying, too. We published a lot of books that in all likelihood would never have otherwise seen the light of day. We introduced the great French political philosopher Chantal Delsol to the English-speaking world. Brought back some forgotten titles and published short biographies of forgotten founders (Bill Kauffman’s portrait of Luther Martin was my favorite). Brought out The Solzhenitsyn Reader, which led to my having the awesome privilege of representing the Solzhenitsyn estate in the English language for the next decade or so. Brought out a couple books that, I must admit, weren’t great mission fits, but which I thought deserved a readership. I was fortunate to have patient and kind bosses.

 

ISI Books is gone now (for the most part; ISI continues to partner with Encounter to publish a couple of books per year). But Creed & Culture cofounder Byron Smith is on ISI’s board, and while he knows it is the right thing for ISI to be out of the book-publishing business, I think he could sense the fun and gratification—if not the fortune-losing—that could be part of such a venture. When he approached me with the Creed & Culture idea, he said that he wanted to publish books like Matthew Crawford’s Soul Class as Soulcraft or Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, books that were exhilarating and challenging. How many such books weren’t getting published, he wondered, because they didn’t fit neatly in any ideological box?

 

I wondered the same thing. It doesn’t exactly take great insight to see that mainstream and university presses are, to use a corporate word, overindexed on conventionally liberal and progressive writers, subjects, and arguments. The situation is especially bad when you venture outside political philosophy. Have you been to a Barnes & Noble lately? Wandered into the history section? What about religion? Let’s say this is as precisely and coolly as possible: the titles on the shelves do not reflect the perspectival diversity of today’s educated readers.

 

Which means there is, or may be, opportunity for fools like us. So here we go.

 

Creed & Culture is going to publish titles for those readers Barnes & Noble and so many presses don’t seem to care much about. History from non-progressive perspectives. Biographies of people we need biographies of. Moving, truth-telling memoirs. Social and cultural analysis of things non-progressives care about. (Yes, I’m trying hard not to use the word conservative. I don’t want to get into definitional controversies, nor would all our authors—or editorial advisors—use that word to describe themselves.)

 

We’re going to publish titles in religion, too—including, but not limited to, frankly theological works. Not only do we expect most of our readers to be people of faith; we also want to push back against the liberal assumption that one can adequately understand the world, reality, or ourselves while bracketing the religious dimension.

 

Finally, we’ll also be throwing new editions of previously published titles into the mix. There are so, so many great works by our kinds of authors, however you wish to label them, to be rediscovered. They deserve better than crappo reprint versions you find on Amazon.

 

We’re fortunate to have the aforementioned Bill Kauffman as our senior editor. Messrs. Crawford and Deneen are among our editorial advisors. That group also includes the philosopher Jennifer Frey and the historian Wilfred McClay. We’ll be announcing more, later.

 

Lastly, and most importantly, our goal is to build a community of readers around this project. If you find what we have said to this point appealing, know that we are here, quite literally, to serve you. Tell us what you would like to see published—what subjects you want to read about, what authors you would like to see on our list, what old books we should consider adding to our catalog. We’d love it if you would subscribe to this Substack and find us on all the other social media platforms (although, to be honest, right now we intend to put most of our attention here). If you purchase our books, please review them on Amazon and Goodreads.

 

First and foremost, jump on our mailing list. We’ll send you a code for 30% off our first season’s titles.

And what is coming in that season? You can find it now at our website. But that will also be the subject of the next post.