Fall 2006   In the city of St. Teresa’s last foundation some 30 publishers and/or editors of the Discalced Carmelite friars she also founded met for five days in September this year. The handsome poster announcing the meeting and fronting the program showed both Teresa and John of the Cross, subjects of many a book and other work produced by the publishers present. Mini-histories (see second story here) of each publishing house sounded out in the auditorium as the meeting progressed. Qualified experts from the field of publishing in Spain  gave informative presentations on technical and publicity matters. The group was to share in a meeting that served as an opportunity to fete the local “El Monte Carmelo” publishing arm of the Burgos OCD Province (our hosts) on the occasion of its 100th anniversary. Into the future the group called for an ongoing association of Carmelite publishers with a permanent secretariat and a tighter cycle of international meetings (the last such meeting took place in 1995, so no one felt we had overdone the frequency of gathering together!).  To organize further steps a religious from Italy, the director of the national clearing house for all the OCD Provinces, Fr. Massimo Angelleli living at Morena near Rome, was asked to represent the group until the next full meeting can be planned and conducted.     For what it’s worth, the following text was drafted for presentation at the above-mentioned Burgos publishers’ congress.  The organizers pleaded for succinctness and clarity, so your scribe did his best to keep it short, thereby probably leaving out some relevant detail or other. But, since we were not asked for historical narratives, just summaries, this is what came out. One historical detail of its delivery is interesting: with same “scribe” taken down by a strong bacillus or microbe upon arrival, the honor of reading it out at the congress fell to Fr. Steven Payne, OCD who was representing English-speaking Africa.  He had taken part in many a project of ICS Publications in the past—gaining for us a Catholic Press Association award for his work on Edith Stein, Her Life in Photos and Documents —so he was well qualified to loan his voice to delivery of the written text. If nothing else, the following paragraphs form a quick overview of the past 33 years, or a third of a century of ICS Publications output on its way, perhaps, to a future centenary celebration like the one that took place in Burgos.    Brief Sketch of the Work of ICS Publications, Washington, D.C. The translation of The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (translators Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D.) proved to be the starting point of the publication history of ICS Publications in 1973.  This volume appeared previously in 1964 as a volume done by Doubleday, the large secular publishers in New York, together with Thomas Nelson in England.  In 1979, the Institute of Carmelite Studies published, through its ICS Publications, a second edition of the translation that included two hitherto unknown autograph letters of St. John discovered after 1964. Twelve years later, in preparation for the fourth centenary of the death of St. John of the Cross in 1991, Fr. Kieran prepared a revised edition of the translation incorporating the results of the latest sanjuanist scholarship, adding footnotes that included helpful cross-references and a glossary of St. John’s terminology. The second volume issued by the then new venture of ICS Publications was The Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux  translated by the Canadian born Discalced Carmelite, Fr. John Clarke, in 1975.  Clarke went on to translate also The Last Conversations and two volumes of the General Correspondence of St. Therese before he died.  The Story of a Soul is our “best seller.” The series of the writings of St. Teresa of Avila began in 1976 with the appearance of volume 1 of “The Collected Works of St. Teresa.”  By year’s end in 2006 we hope to have available the second volume of The Letters of St. Teresa of Avila, thus concluding the work of translation by Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. Our series of The Collected Works of Edith Stein began in 1986 with the appearance of Life in a Jewish Family.  By this year 2006 we have published ten (10) volumes of her works. In 1980 the first volume in the (irregular) series CARMELITE STUDIES appeared.  Before 2006 ends we will have published ten (10) volumes of essays in this series. From October 1994 onward we have been producing and distributing cassette tapes and CD/Roms of lectures, but we are planning on sub-letting this operation to other people since the books take up much of our staff’s time. This year we reached the plateau of 1,250,000 volumes shipped from our headquarters. Since, however, we have given permission to other O.C.D. publishing ventures to use our copyrighted texts, the volumes in circulation worldwide that owe their origin to the efforts of the Washington Province’s ICS Publications is much higher than that number. Likewise, several volumes were produced in coordinated efforts with other O.C.D. publishing houses.  The colleagues at the Burgos meeting can identify which volumes of ICS Publications have helped them forward in their productivity, just as the Publisher of ICS Publications can, with merited satisfaction, identify volumes we distributed thanks to the work of our Discalced Carmelite brethren in other countries around the globe.   [Text by John Sullivan, O.C.D.]