Vol. 2 Butlers Original Lives of the Saints – Feb. & March

Rev. Alban Butler’s ORIGINAL Lives of the Saints – Introduction, February & March – Hardcover – Illustrated -578 pages Very few published works require such a lengthy explanation of exactly WHICH edition is being offered, in what format, and why, than Fr. Alban Butler s Lives of the Saints. The reason is that there are so many very different books being printed under this author s name and under this title due to it s long history (the work is almost 300 years old) and its universal popularity. Few catholic books except the Bible, the Confessions, the Imitation, and the Summa, are as widely read. This book has also been extensively revised, altered, and updated since its original publication, with new editions, even 21st century revisions being made, that we feel the time is ripe for an original, unexpurgated, and unrevised print version to be made available. This edition is widely considered to be the most complete and authoritative ever issued. It is the 1854 edition of D. J. Sadlier of New York, and in the Preface it gives its pedigree. The original was printed anonymously in London in 1759, after 30 years work on the project. The edition published by Sadlier is an exact replica of the Dublin and London edition of 1833. Being a scholarly work, but also a work deeply imbued with the piety and devotion of a priest s lifetime effort, it is loaded with footnotes which comprise a significant proportion of the total text. In the original book, the footnotes were printed in such a small, closely-set typeface, that they were almost unreadable. Loreto Publications has utilized the recent development of OCR scanning to extract the original text and to put it into a modern, highly readable, and much larger font typeface than any of the old editions. We have extensively proofread the text thus generated, and have made the layout user friendly as the moderns so succinctly state. In addition, our already available edition of Butler s Little Pictorial Lives which is a drastic a