Nunc Coepi Press was founded by Craig Browning — a Catholic father and grandfather, and a parishioner at his home parish in San Diego — out of a simple conviction: that the Church’s great images belong in families’ hands, in books made well enough to hand down.
The name is the press’s whole method. Nunc coepi — “now I begin” — is the cry of Psalm 76 in the Vulgate and the lifelong motto of the Venerable Bruno Lanteri: after every fall, every delay, every unfinished thing, begin again, now. Each of our books is compiled by hand, image by image and fact by fact, on that principle.
What we do has an older name: traditio — from the Latin tradere, to hand over, to hand down. It is one of the oldest ways the Church has ever formed hearts: beauty, and a daily rhythm, in the illuminated manuscripts, icons, and books of hours made for ordinary households centuries before printing presses existed. Our books stand in that line — Scripture, the saints, and the Doctors of the Church, handed down in a form beautiful enough to keep.
And the beauty is not decoration. Via pulchritudinis — the Way of Beauty, the quiet subtitle this press works under — is the Church’s own name for how an encounter with genuine beauty can open the soul to God in a way argument alone cannot, as Pope St. John Paul II taught in his Letter to Artists. A picture book treated as a work of art is not vanity; it is reverence toward its subject.
These are not books meant to be read once and shelved. They are meant to sit on a kitchen table through a year of saints, to be placed in the hands of a godchild or a grandchild as something sturdy enough to last. In an age of the disposable and the digital, there is something worth recovering in a well-made book — the kind once common in Catholic homes, filled with art and story meant to form the soul as much as the eye. They are made for families, parishes, and godparents — and for anyone who wants the saints to be part of ordinary life.
We are a one-man imprint, deliberately. The compiler’s name stands on the title page of every book we make — and nowhere else in it. The books are about their subjects, not about us. If a book of ours helps one family pray, remember, or begin again, it has done its work. Faithful in little things is the measure we keep — small work, done daily, without fanfare, and entrusted with something eternal.
