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Children have a certain wildness in their hearts, a spirit of adventure that should not be quashed but aimed toward good.
Forming children’s moral imagination is the goal of a new book collection from Catholic publishing house Cluny Media. And it fits right into Cluny’s mission of rescuing forgotten literary treasures.
Cluny’s new Allta Collection of children’s books is designed to captivate the imagination while educating for virtue. Every member of the family will find inspiration in these works of goodness, truth, and beauty.
A mission of rescuing forgotten books
John Emmet Clarke, editor-in-chief of Cluny Media, based in Providence, Rhode Island, first took an interest in reintroducing neglected Catholic books as a student at Providence College.
A philosophy major, he was assigned to read French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s 1920 book Art and Scholasticism. But the book was out of print and hard to find, so the professor resorted to making photocopies for the entire class.
Clarke read Maritain’s books as a “stapled printer-paper edition” for four classes, he told the National Catholic Register in a 2023 interview.
That experience made him realize how many great books cry out to be brought back into print.
“So many literary treasures are buried in the past, awaiting a discerning hand to dig them out and show them forth once more,” Clarke said in an interview with Aleteia.
After this experience, Clarke took to heart the mission of Cluny Media. Gellert and Margaret Dornay and Clarke’s parents Leo and Kathleen Clarke had founded the press in 2015. In 2017, Clarke and his friend and business partner Scott W. Thompson assumed ownership and operation.
Like Maritain’s works, these lost classics are wonderful reading, but have been undeservedly consigned to the dust heap of history.
As the Cluny website explains, “Re-making these books into beautiful editions is our contribution to keeping the fire of tradition burning, passing its light from our hands to yours and sharing its warmth together, for our good and the good of God’s providential, redeeming plan.”
The Allta Collection reaches the “wilderness” in souls
“Not tame books, but good,” reads the tagline on Cluny’s new children’s line, hearkening to the Narnia Chronicles’ description of the Christ figure Aslan as “wild” and “not tame,” but good.
The very name of the collection honors this connection between the wildness of God and the human heart:
Reality is wild. And no one should enter the wilderness unread.
ALLTA (from the Gaelic for “wild”) is a collection of carefully designed and beautifully illustrated books in premium, hardbound editions, to inspire wonder in the hearts and minds of young readers.
Inside each person, Clarke said, “there is a wilderness, an unruly and unrestrained expanse crying out for order and maintenance.” This wilderness is obvious in children who “venture about — or ought to venture about — as if everything was a quest: a quest for answers, for treasures, for food, for companionship, for stories… And when they find it, they are astonished.”
This spirit of adventure, of rejoicing in creation’s goodness, can be kept alive and channeled toward the good with great stories.
“Allta books are meant to nourish a child’s imagination, to populate it, as well as to set boundaries for it. They educate for virtue,” Clarke said.
Introducing the inaugural stories
- Good King Wenceslas, by Mildred Correl Luckhardt with color illustrations by Gordon Laite, was first published in 1964. Young Vojak is freed from slavery and given the Christian name of Stephen. In faithful service to the king, Stephen must be ready at each dangerous moment and every dramatic turn to follow in the footsteps of his master, good King Wenceslas.
- The Saintmaker’s Christmas Eve, written and decorated by Paul Horgan, was first published in 1955. Christmas 1809: Roberto Castillo delivers to the village of San Cristóbal a statue of their patron—St. Christopher bearing on his shoulder the holy Christ Child. Upon his return home, Roberto greets his brother, not with their payment, but with strange, miraculous tidings.
- The True Meaning of Christmas, by Archbishop Fulton Sheen with color illustrations by Fritz Kredel, was first published in 1955. Practically a Christmas Midnight Mass homily by the always-pithy and profound Archbishop Sheen, this small volume offers a meditation upon the Incarnation and Nativity of Jesus Christ, Son of the Most High, born in a lowly stable in Bethlehem, and the significance it bears and salvation it extends to all.
Handing down the fire
Clarke eloquently explained the mission of Cluny to “hand down the fire” of truth, goodness, and beauty in a world that so often rejects them:
Cluny exists because we want the world that our children grow up and grow old in to be a world where good books are remembered and read. The work of Cluny, especially the Allta Collection, is our contribution to the fire-fight of ordering and maintaining the wilderness into a civilization. Monsignor Ronald Knox once described this work as “fighting a fire, desperately keeping at bay, here and there, the flames of unbelief and of social disorder, while we hurriedly rescue all that we have time to rescue.” And that’s true. It’s also true to say that this work requires another fire, a fire that is kept burning so it can warm and enlighten those who gather around it. This is the fire of truth. And this is the fire that Cluny seeks to serve.
The Allta Collection books are handsomely bound hardcover editions, designed to withstand even the wildest of wildernesses. Add them to your home library today and delight in channeling your child’s high spirits toward the goodness found in our Catholic faith.
