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John Knox Press, one of the better Protestant publishing houses, was caught in the left-right crossfire within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. The firm had to cut its publishing schedule in half this year, at least partially because of conservative dissatisfaction with its parent agency, the Church's Board of Christian Education.
The huge Protestant evangelical market, however, is flourishing. Word, Inc., a record-and-book publishing firm in Waco, Texas, has produced a pair of phenomenal bestsellers on spiritual group dynamics by an Episcopalian oilman named Keith Miller (TIME, Sept. 19). Together they have sold some 700,000 hardback copies. Other evangelical bestsellers stress personal experience. David Wilkerson's The Cross and the Switchblade, for instance, tells of Wilkerson's life as a street minister amid New York City's gangs, and has sold more than 6,000,000 copies, mostly in paperback, in 24 languages. Some 2,900 nondenominational evangelical bookstores in the U.S. account for an estimated $113 million in gross sales annually.
Packaged Topics. Success has not been the exclusive domain of conservatives, nor disaster the exclusive fate of liberals. The Christian, a lively, 110-year-old evangelical newsweekly in Great Britain, died last year. Triumph, an archconservative U.S. Catholic monthly, faces severe financial problems.
The liberal Catholic publishing house of Herder and Herder, on the other hand, has sold some 350,000 hardback English-language copies of the Dutch Catechism.
The puckish, progressive bimonthly, the Critic, is remarkably healthy —abetted by a brace of profitable newsletters, Protestant and Catholic, a series of packaged sermon topics, and the Thomas More Book Club.
Various schemes for survival are being tried. Though specialized magazines for priests have had their own troubles lately, Father Clifford Stevens of Santa Fe, N. Mex., has recently launched a slick, readable monthly called Schema XIII (after the Vatican II document on the church in the modern world), which tries to overcome the stodgy clerical image of competing periodicals. Methodists and Presbyterians have joined to launch a new "multimedia" mission magazine, New World Outlook, replete with poster-size foldouts and stapled-in phonograph records. The Roman Catholic Maryknoll fathers have announced a new line of "Third World" books about problems in underdeveloped countries, to be edited by Philip Scharper, formerly with Sheed and Ward.
The U.S. Catholic Conference has spent a good deal of money to make the National Catholic News Service a thoroughgoing, even painfully candid, news organization.
Indeed, Publisher Norman Shaifer, a non-Catholic layman who backed the short-lived Priests' Forum magazine of the National Federation of Priests' Councils, suggests that what progressives need to develop is the conservative's willingness to spend not only time but also money on communications. An example of a liberal who does so, Shaifer points out, is Belgium's Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens, who is developing an elaborate communications system in Europe. Liberals in the U.S. must do the same, insists Shaifer. "They spend so much time talking among themselves that they don't realize that others still haven't got the message."