The Saint Austin Press was founded in 1996, above a bookshop in Southampton, by a small company of young Catholics who had noticed something that ought to have troubled more people than it did: that the books which had formed the Catholic mind in England for two centuries — the standard lives of the saints, the great commentaries on the liturgy and on Scripture, the manuals of the interior life — were, almost without exception, out of print. They set about the unfashionable work of putting them back. In the years that followed the Press published across liturgy, letters, hagiography and spirituality, and gave a permanent form to the proceedings of the international liturgical colloquia of CIEL.

Since resuming in 2021 we have narrowed the aim and raised the bar. We publish complete texts, never abridgements, and we make them as books were made when it was assumed they would outlive their first owners: sewn, not glued; bound in cloth over boards; furnished with endpapers, headbands and a ribbon; and, wherever the old type had worn thin under a century of photographic reprinting, reset afresh. It was on these terms that, in 2026, Dom Guéranger's Liturgical Year received its first new English setting in a hundred and fifty years, and its first printing in red and black.

We do this not from antiquarian sentiment but from a conviction about proportion: that a text which has shaped the Church's prayer deserves the care with which it was written, and that a book meant to be opened every morning for thirty years should be built to bear it. The rest is detail — though we are, admittedly, rather particular about the detail.