Christian Aid: Pushing the Envelope
Christian Aid Week is upon us (9 – 15 May 2010) and the familiar red envelopes will soon be appearing through people’s letter boxes as thousands of supporters take to the streets to raise both awareness and money to help end poverty.
But there’s another way that we as booksellers and retailers can help too, and that’s simply by stocking the growing range of resources available from St Mark’s Press: for every textbook or CD sold, a £1 donation goes to Christian Aid.
If you haven’t heard of St Mark’s Press, don’t panic: they’re a relatively new publisher who have only been trading for just over a year. Alongside their own titles, they’ve taken over part of the William Barclay backlist and acquired some bestselling RE textbooks from Lion, which they’ve reissued in new editions. Simon Danes, pictured below, is their Director, and he knows his books, having read Theology at Brasenose College, Oxford, where — for better or for worse — he was a contemporary of a certain PPE student called David Cameron – ‘though I was two years above him and I don’t expect he remembers me!’
Simon Danes
Simon was in teaching for 20 years before setting up the company:
I used to be a head of RE and I did that for about ten years in a non denominational comprehensive school. I really enjoyed it, and then I did the same thing in a church school. Then I moved into senior management, focussing mainly on the academic side of school life. I didn’t want to be a head and so decided to do something completely different.
So why publishing?
Well, I’d had some experience of it. With my brother Chris, I’d written a number of textbooks for Lion. Two of them were really successful: Mark: A Gospel for Today and Today’s Issues and Christian Beliefs. They’re both GCSE textbooks. Mark sold something like 65,000. Today’s Issues did even better: well over 100,000 and there were a lot of translations produced. I was a best selling author in Lithuania!
I asked Lion if I could take the titles and publish them myself and they very graciously agreed. The syllabuses had moved on and they badly needed updating. 70% of our edition of our Today’s Issues is entirely new.
Mark - A Gospel for Today
Today's Issues
The core of the business, then, was the textbooks. I then got in touch with William Barclay’s estate – he of the Daily Study Bible. Barclay’s sold an astonishing number; I’ve heard the figure of 17 million copies. I’d always liked Barclay’s books and it was marvellous when we got the rights.
William Barclay, The Gospels and Acts
We’ve started with The Gospels and Acts. This is essentially a two volume introduction to New Testament scholarship. Sounds dry and dusty but Barclay really makes it come alive. He’s just jaw droppingly good. He writes good prose, which isn’t usual with an academic, and he had an absolutely encyclopaedic knowledge, and not just about the Bible and biblical studies. Amazingly learned. And then he’s balanced, generous, thorough – and his faith shines through.
The first volume’s out now; the second follows around July. And we’re doing Barclay’s The Mind of St Paul, a shorter book which gives a lot of insight into Paul’s thought. That should be out in July too.
What else is coming up?
More Barclays! I’m also writing a book for the non specialist on philosophy of religion: the arguments for God’s existence, whether we can prove religion, that sort of thing. It’s partly a riposte to Dawkins, but this will be quite a fun book with lots of illustrations and some humour too.
Mark's Gospel CD
We’ve got a really dramatic CD of the NIV text of Mark’s Gospel. We recorded that in a freezing studio in Cambridge with an actor called Peter Wickham. He’s with the BBC Radio Drama Company and he’s done literally hundreds of audiobooks, so he really knows his stuff. We did Mark because it’s the most popular Gospel set at GCSE but I’d like to do the others too.
And what can you offer us as booksellers?
The Barclays and the CDs are proving popular. The textbooks are being stocked; the Lion editions were carried quite heavily by a number of Christian bookshops and we’re seeing that with our versions too. Teachers can pick up copies but they’re also useful for church study groups – and for students (and their parents!) who are anxious about their children’s revision. The Mark CD’s a popular revision aid.
All our textbooks and CDs carry a donation of £1 to Christian Aid.
If you’re with Fairway Marketing, we work with them and you can order through your rep. Otherwise, do contact us direct.
To find out more visit www.stmarkspress.com, email info AT stmarkspress.com or, if you want to chat with Simon personally, he’d be very pleased to hear from you: feel welcome to call him on 01234 824861.
Also hot off the press is Kathy Galloway’s Sharing the Blessing, “A reflection on the spirituality and practice of working for justice and overcoming poverty, both local and global” (9780281059492, SPCK, £8.99).
Then we have The Christian Aid Book of Simple Feasts by Sarah Stancliffe: “A unique recipe collection for church caterers and party organisers everywhere… tried-and-tested ideas for cooking for large numbers on a budget” (9781853118364, SCM-Canterbury Press, £8.99).
Michael Northcott’s A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming is billed as “essential reading for anyone concerned about the greatest threat to our planet and its people” (9780232526684, Darton, Longman & Todd, £12.95).
Taking a more meditative approach, but I suspect nonetheless challenging for that, we have Timothy Radcliffe’s Just One Year: “An indispensable resource for groups who wish to include poor communities in their prayer and worship” (9780232526691, Darton, Longman & Todd, £12.95). 
Through the Year with Oscar Romero presents a series of daily meditations taken from the late Archbishop of San Salvador’s broadcast talks which “invite us to move into the ‘intimate space’ of our conscience and then go out to create a more just world” (9780232526950, Darton, Longman & Todd, £9.95).
Finally Pocket Prayers for Peace and Justice offers a selection of “thought-provoking prayers from many different countries and traditions, collected to inspire those praying for fairness, harmony and freedom around the world” (9780715140215, Church House Publishing, £5.99).
So what’s in this issue? Sixteen different commentary series at ‘Buy one, get one half price’ — those on offer include, amongst others: Zondervan’s Illustrated Bible Background Commentaries (New Testament only); BRF’s People’s Bible Commentaries; Evangelical Press’ Welwyn Commentaries; Thomas Nelson’s Preacher’s Commentaries; Eerdman’s New International Commentaries; and Paternoster’s Word Biblical Commentaries. 
Other highlights include John Drane’s classics, Introducing the Old Testament and Introducing the New Testament, both on offer at £4 off, £20 down to £16; the Lion Handbook to the Bible at £3 off, £18 down to £15; and Joel Edwards’ 
