The Chancel Press is a small, deliberately uncommercial enterprise devoted to bringing out-of-print works of the Anglican tradition back into the hands of readers. We believe that a great deal of what is most worth reading in the Anglican past is no longer in print, no longer in libraries within easy reach, and no longer offered in any form that does it justice. The page-scans that have replaced the printed book on the open Internet are valuable for the scholar; they are not, ordinarily, what one reads at a desk in the evening.
Our practice is straightforward. We choose a public-domain work whose republication seems to us overdue. We settle on a single edition of record — usually the latest the author himself authorised, or, for posthumous collections, the first collected edition. We hand-correct the optical recognition of that edition against its page-images. We set the corrected text in classical book typography, using the same kind of design our authors would have recognised: generous margins, old-style figures, restrained small-capital titles, footnotes where the author put them. We print real editions on real paper.
Our editions are diplomatic, not critical. We silently correct obvious printer's errors; we regularise long-s, ligatures, and other archaic conventions to modern practice; we modernise punctuation only where retention would now obscure rather than illuminate the sense. Scriptural references are preserved as the author gave them. We do not collate against other editions, and we do not present a variorum apparatus; readers who need that should consult the original page-images, freely available at Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and similar sources.
All of our typesetting and editorial work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike licence. We do not claim copyright over the texts themselves, which are in the public domain and which belong to everyone. The printed editions are sold to recoup their production cost; nothing else.
Stay informed
Several volumes are in active preparation. The press releases a notice when each is ready — ordinarily two or three a year. If you would like to be notified, please write to books@chancelpress.com.
Editorial inquiries
We welcome correspondence from readers, scholars, and clergy with suggestions for works that ought to be reprinted, or with offers to assist in the slow labour of correction. Please write to editors@chancelpress.com.