This and That

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.

This morning I read an email that begins:

In this season of miracles, consider this: JWR is among the oldest surviving non-corporate sites on the web, having just had its 13th birthday — its “bar mitzvah”, if you will.

A miracle? Well, maybe not in the biblical sense. But certainly one by modern standards. Consider how many other sites have come and gone. Ones that had millions invested in them have disappeared into the ether.

Yeah, in public Web time, that’s a long life span.

So is 15 years and almost 5 months — how long Anabaptists has been on the Web…almost exclusively on the founder’s nickel (which even JWR can’t say). 😆

Speaking of nickels, a while later I read another email that winds down this way:

So these greatly-appreciated gifts, $1280 in all, bring our total to $5545.61 for 2010. That’s just $11,574.39 short of our goal for the year. Gulp. Of course, if there were just 11 other churches like the one on the East Coast — it’s doable. Lacking that, we would need about 116 extremely visionary types to each kick in $100. Or any combination of the two.

And if those 116 extremely visionary types are extremely so, they can do more kicking here. 😯

Or maybe I mean 🙄 — or even :oops:.

See ya.

I ask the question (using different words) over at my business blog: How’s Your Reading Compare?

In that post I tell you from which two books I read yesterday.

And give you the opportunity to reveal what (if anything) you’re reading from A Certain List. 🙂

So click the link above and join the conversation (as “they” say).

Or wife. Or sister. Or aunt. Or grandma. Or sister-in-law. Or mother-in-law. Or daughter-in-law. Or all of the above. Or someone else. Or yourself. Or all of the above all over again.

Buy it now or wish you had.

(Yes, I’d tell you what to do. Well, maybe.)

At least go look at it.

Thanks!