Simon Schrock recalls visiting Dulles International Airport with his daughter many years ago and being shocked to see Playboy magazines sold at one of its newsstands.
“She pointed at Playboy and said, ‘Oh, Daddy, look there,'” said Schrock, 74. “I said, ‘I’m concerned where this is going. What’s it doing to the nation? What’s it doing to young people?'”
So Schrock got involved. In 1968, the journeyman carpenter and part-time Anabaptist preacher persuaded a newsstand at National Airport to add 10 Christian titles to its racks. By the 1970s, he was selling 600 books every two weeks, he said.
By the 1980s, he’d helped found Choice Books, a Harrisonburg, Va.-based company that describes itself as a distributor of “inspirational, wholesome and family-oriented reading materials.” Today, with eight offices stretching from the Great Lakes to the Gulf states and Northern Virginia, the company sells about 8,000 books a day, Schrock said – more than 5 million books a year through more than 10,000 kiosks at highway rest stops, drugstores, department stores and airports.
Source: Choice Books’ faith-based paperbacks bring readers into the fold
Bro. Simon is fighting lymphoma.
Late last year I had hoped to land a Choice Books job here in Oregon. It didn’t pan out; I withdrew from the Applicant Mix due in large part to our needing to finalize a new place to live.
We sell several of Simon Schrock’s books. One of them is mentioned in the above article: What Shall the Redeemed Wear? And if you go to Anabaptist Bookstore‘s catalog home page and search for his name, you’ll see a list of all his books we sell.