CHRISTMAS
The Annual of Christmas Literature and Art, Vol. 59
The editors of Augsburg Fortress
Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Fortress, 1989
64 pp., $16.95, cloth; $8.95, paper
This Christmas story begins in a four-story building with a façade the dun hue of unleavened Norwegian flatbread, sitting stolidly at Fifth Avenue and Fourth Street on Minneapolis' old newspaper Row, in the heart of the printing district. The white-on-black sign above the main entrance is matter-of-fact:
AUGSBURG FORTRESS
BOOKS, BILBES, CHURCH SUPPLIES
Behind these somber walls is the publishing company of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). This year, the Augsburg Fortress will post sales of between $62 and $63 million, making it the second- or third-largest denominational publisher in the United States.
Also from behind these walls comes a colorful, nay exotic, book, Christmas: An Annual of Christmas Literature and Art. Christmas has done its part to boost the religious publisher's revenues for more than half a century. To date, Augsburg Fortress and its predecessor have sold about 51 million copies of this beautifully mounted publication.
It was not ever thus.
Back in 1931, Randolph Haugan, the young general manager of Augsburg, had a dream. The small-town preacher's kid wanted to publish an American annual that would celebrate the coming of the Christ Child, one that would put the Christ back in Christmas and "remind all of us of this event through music, literature, and art."
Despite the Great Depression, he bore down and did it. The first year, Haugan printed five thousand copies. Most of them went begging, and the little firm lost money. But he hung in there, and sales picked up with time. Haugan personally supervised every volume of the Christmas annual for fifty years, even working on it for ten years after his retirement as general manager of Augsburg in 1970.
I have had the pleasure of reading through all fifty-nine volumes in the collection, housed at the Augsburg Fortress offices just a block away from the newspaper where I work. Taken as a whole, these books evoke powerful memories of our recent past and provide highly emotional reflections of how our world, our tastes, and our reading habits have changed over the past sixty years.
Inclusivity
Fifty-nine years ago, Haugan told his colleagues they could all learn from the Reader's Digest formula, in which article variety attracted many categories of readers. This year's annual and all those preceding it reflect that lesson. Art and photography, beautifully reproduced in full color. Fiction about Christmas. Nonfiction about Christmas traditions, customs, art. Even recipes. And the Christmas story, according to Saint Luke and Saint Matthew--always the
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