In celebration of our 75th Anniversary, we are sharing fun facts and trivia from the Notre Dame Press vault! Did you know we have these gems in our backlist?
Notre Dame Press was founded in 1949, and we have worked hard to keep as many books as we can in print. Our oldest book still available for purchase today is The Bible and the Liturgy by Jean Daniélou S.J., published in 1956. That’s just seven years after the foundation of the Press!
A leader in spirituality studies, John S. Dunne had taught more Notre Dame students than any other person in the University’s history at the time of his death. Additionally, he wrote over 20 books on theology and the spiritual life, many of which were published by Notre Dame Press, including his last work Eternal Consciousness.
Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux, by Patrick Samway S.J., examines Flannery O’Connor’s personal and professional relationship with her editor, Robert Giroux. But in addition to his work with O’Connor, Robert Giroux was editor for no less than seven Nobel Laureates, including Notre Dame Press author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel aren’t the only Nobel Laureates on the Notre Dame Press list! Henri Bergson, author of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927.
A peek into the Notre Dame Press backlist will reveal a number of Holocaust narratives, but Bernice Lerner’s The Triumph of Wounded Souls is a particular standout. It was lauded by no less than two major literary figures, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel and Pulitzer–prize winner Robert Coles.
When we say that Notre Dame Press is a global force for good, we can back it up! Our books are translated around the world, and they travel to every corner. They’ve even made their way into the Vatican! Pope Francis himself has held one of our books: The Chapels of Notre Dame by Lawrence S. Cunningham with photographs from Matt Cashore.
Every Notre Dame Press illustrated coffee table book since 2012 has a cute animal intentionally added to the front or back matter. See if you can find the donkey in Notre Dame’s Happy Returns!
One of Notre Dame Press’s longest-running series is the Kellogg Institute Series on Democracy and Development. This series was founded in 1985 and has inspired more than 80 titles that shape our understanding of democratic politics and human development. One of the first books in the series is Roberto DaMatta’s Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes.
As the World Series gets underway, discover the life of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867–1903) in Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, which was named one of the Society for American Baseball Research’s top 50 books on baseball.
In 2005, the Press published Pity the Drowned Horses by Sheryl Luna, the inaugural winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. This prize, a result of a partnership with the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame, was the first of its kind in the United States and is awarded to support the work of emerging Latino/a poets.
In 1960, the Press published its first paperback: Chaucer Criticism: The Canterbury Tales, edited by R. J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, this book is still in print today!
Notre Dame Press sells books and ebooks to readers around the world! One of our top markets for ebooks is Germany, where the top three bestselling ebooks are: After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, and On Being Free by Frithjof Bergmann.
On Being Free presents a genuine rethinking of freedom that has been lauded as “eminently readable, wise, and provocative” by Modern Age and “a damn good book” by Teaching Philosophy.