We Catholics love our books.
For years a particular Catholic used book dealer in the midwest has been providing great titles of all kinds.
Loome Theological Bookseller is famous.
They need help.
On a personal note, back in the darkest days of liturgical and theological chaos of the ’80s, we prospective seminarians and seminarians and young priests would trek from the Twin Cities and other far flung places to drive over to Stillwater for some hours of browsing at Loome’s. It was there that I spent more money than I should have for liturgical books and volumes of history of the Church and sets of philosophical texts such as the St. Thomas Aquinas that I still treasure and old manuals that I still consult. Those books gave me a ladder into higher Catholic things which stood me in good stead through seminary (sniffing out their lies and heresies) and readying me for the wars that were to come my way. They provided weapons and armor and helped to forge my hard-won Catholic identity.
They were a kind of redoubt against the insanity that swept through the Church.
Loome Theological Bookseller has changed hands and location, but they still have a mission: provide precious and hard to find books to people all over the world.
Loome Theological Bookseller needs help right now to keep their brick and mortal store open and to avoid going to mail order only.
They have a GoFundMe campaign on.
I ask you, please, to help.
I’ll be that 10,000 of you could afford, say, $5.
Please help this store, which has helped us in the identity wars.
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Psst Fr, I think you mean brick and mortaR ;-)!
I donated (and shared via Facebook) not simply to help keep a valuable bookseller going but also because we too have been through the NICU journey. Floreat!
I’m so sorry to hear Loome Booksellers is in trouble. I’ve never been to the physical store, but have had a number of happy, and valuable, dealings with them by phone over the years. My good copy of Msgr. Knox’s New Testament – sitting on my coffee table because it’s the NT I most often read and consult – came from them.
My most special memory of dealing with Loome is from 20+ years ago. Previously, while living in a Carmelite community (which later went through an unfortunate demise), my superior put into my hands one year as Advent began a book of the Gospel Meditations of Bishop Prohaszka (who lived 1858-1927). His simple yet insightful meditations for Advent were very moving to read. Several years later, after the demise, I met a very special Hungarian priest who had escaped horrendous communist persecution in Hungary and was then residing at a friary in Illinois. I mentioned these meditations of Bishop Prohaszka to him in conversation, and he told he he wasn’t aware that they had been translated into English. So I began a search to find a copy for him. The research librarians I consulted could find no reference whatever to this book, no matter what database they looked into. Then I called Loome Booksellers. When I told the gentleman who answered what I was looking for, he replied, without even putting the phone receiver down (landlines in those days), “Yes, I have a copy right up here on the shelf”, and he reached up and pulled it down without, apparently, moving from where he stood. It was a fine copy, and not long afterwards, at Christmas, it was in the possession of the special priest I’d met. Who wouldn’t greatly value knowing a bookseller such as this?