The family prayer book
Your bedtime prayers, your children's names, an illuminated hardcover. Build it page by page and reserve a copy.
The prayers you say every night, in a book made for your family.
Angel of God. Our Father. Hail Mary. Then God bless Mommy and Daddy, and every name in your house. Choose the prayers, add the names, and we print them in an illuminated hardcover you can read at bedtime for years.
How it works
- Choose the prayers. Seventeen traditional prayers in their classic English, from the Sign of the Cross to the Memorare. Tick the ones your family says and put them in your order.
- Add the names. The children's names go on the cover, on the dedication page and into the family blessing. Godparents, grandparents and the parish can go in too.
- See every page. The pages render as you type: parchment, a gold rule, rubrics in red, painted initials, and plates from a sixteenth-century Book of Hours. Print a proof at home if you want it in your hands first.
- Reserve, then approve. Nothing is charged on the site. We send the price and a proof, and print after you say yes.
A small Catholic publishing house
Catholic Social Books prints what a family, a parish or a diocese already prays, made to order and bound to last. The first title is the family prayer book. The rest is in preparation and open for reservations.
The devotion journal
Tell us the devotions you keep and we print a month around them: the calendar, the novenas, your diocese's saints, room to write. No phone in the chair.
Parish and diocesan editions
Pew cards with the week's prayers, feast-day booklets for the patron, a class set for a confirmation group. Written with the pastor, printed in the quantity the parish needs.
Recovered titles
The Confessions, the Imitation, the Story of a Soul, Newman, Chesterton, the Fathers: public-domain works set cleanly and kept in print, in paperback, hardcover, digital and audio.
Four ways the prayer book is made
Family hardcover
A Smyth-sewn hardcover, 6 by 8 inches, printed in full color on heavy uncoated paper with a gold-foil cover. One copy, made for one family.
Heirloom hardcover
The same book with a hand-lettered dedication page and a presentation box, for a baptism, a First Communion or a godchild.
Booklet
Saddle-stitched, 5.5 by 8.5 inches, the same pages on the same paper. For godparents and grandparents, a classroom, or a copy for each child.
Digital edition
A PDF of your pages at full resolution, for a tablet at the bedside or printing at home. Sent after your proof is approved, and updated when a new name joins the family.
Prices are set per edition and confirmed with your proof. Parishes and schools can ask about a class set.
The illumination
The plates come from the Spinola Hours, a Flemish Book of Hours painted around 1510 to 1520 and held by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty releases these images into the public domain, and each painting is printed whole, at its own proportions, facing the prayers. The text pages follow the same manuscript's manner: parchment, a gold rule, headings in red, and a painted initial opening each prayer.
Start with tonight's prayers
It takes a few minutes, and you see the whole book before you decide anything.