OPEN LETTER FROM STRATFORD CALDECOTT

In February 2009 I was appointed Senior Editor at Sophia Institute Press, following its affiliation with the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. Both institutions are located in New Hampshire , but I remain based in Oxford , where my wife and I run a small research centre and summer programme for the college.

I am sending this letter to friends, advisers and potential authors in order to give some sense of what I will try to accomplish at Sophia, and how you may be able to help.

My task is, while preserving the traditional Sophia strengths – its popular reprints, spiritual classics and self-help and transformational titles, as well as the successful new imprint for Catholic fiction, Imagio – to broaden the range to include more scholarly, though still accessible titles in keeping with Sophia’s developing role as a college Press.

As some of you know, I worked for many years as a senior editor for Routledge and for HarperCollins. In the 1990s I was the editor for T&T Clark, an Edinburgh-based publisher that was later bought by Continuum in London . I also still serve on the editorial board of the Catholic Truth Society in London , and of several international journals (Communio, The Chesterton Review and Oasis, details of which are appended). All of this experience, I believe, has helped to prepare me for my new job.

Your help is something I will greatly value. Every editor depends on a network of friends and contacts. Like a man armed with a fishing net, he has to trawl for the best projects, the most interesting manuscripts around, and for that he needs help. But in addition to this, a creative editor will also inspire new projects, putting ideas and authors together that might not have met without him. Ideas have consequences, but in order to bear fruit they must be developed, expressed and communicated. This collaboration with authors is something I am particularly looking forward to.

So, if you would like to write for Sophia Institute Press, or if you know of a book that needs an appropriate publisher and think we might be it, I hope you will contact me at Sophia in the near future, and bear us in mind in the years ahead.

Stratford Caldecott

 

SOME DETAILS

Sophia Institute is a nonprofit institution affiliated to the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. The Press publishes books both classic and new that fulfill the ideals of the Institute, making available a rich source of enduring wisdom to the widest possible range of readers. Through the Imagio imprint it seeks to revive the great tradition of Catholic fiction. Second Spring Books is a new imprint of the Press that features accessible scholarly works. This imprint offers an understanding of the contemporary world rooted in the Catholic tradition of humane letters. It is associated also with the College’s journal of faith and culture, Second Spring, now also published by Sophia.

 

Web-sites

Sophia Institute Press

Thomas More College

Second Spring and the Centre for Faith & Culture in Oxford

Communio journal

The Chesterton Review

Oasis journal

 

For your free Sophia catalog, call toll-free 1-800-888-9344 or write Sophia Institute Press, Box 5284 , Manchester , NH 03108 , USA

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