Someone probably should have stopped us.
 
Starting a new press is financially insane, and it’s hard work to boot. Plus, we’re rapidly becoming a postliterate society. Who reads books anymore? Seems like most folks can’t even get through a 500-word Substack before heading back to the Gram.
 
All true—too true. But we read books, and our friends and family members read books, and we love books, we believe in books, and no one seemed to be publishing the sort of books we wanted to read. Not enough of them, anyway.
 
So here we are, betting that not everyone is going to become postliterate overnight, and that AI-generated content won’t soon constitute all people consume. Betting that the ideological biases shared by most presses have left a sizeable chunk of the reading market underserved. And betting that there are still plenty of people like us who want to read serious, high-quality nonfiction that is rooted in an earnest search for truth.
 
There is a surfeit of tribalist content out there, plenty of books meant to be relevant for about six months, plenty of cheap conventionality. We’re going in another direction. Our goal is to curate genuinely excellent work in history, biography, memoir, religion, and social and cultural analysis.
 
Put another way, our goal is to publish titles that are compelling enough to do honor to a major mainstream publisher, intelligent enough to be of interest to a top university press, and contrarian enough to be spurned by both.
 
“One word of truth can outweigh the whole world.”  Such was the judgment of the most courageous writer of the last century, a man who lived through totalitarian terrors and horrors beyond our imaginations.
 
If he believed that, why shouldn’t we?