Home

Using open source software to produce well typeset hymnbooks that can be customised to suit the local culture and history of the community. Currently aimed at a Catholic Latin Mass community in Australia.

Home bound books

---

The Draft Traditional Hymnbook is aimed primarily at making a hymnbook for a particular Latin Mass community. All the work going into this could help other groups looking for a useful pewbook tailored to their own community customs.

The book is being assembled with LuaLaTeX, part of the TeX family of open source document preparation systems.

Congregavit nos in unum

Making hymnbooks without copyright restrictions. Available for purchase as paperback via Lulu. Available to download as pdf here http://sourceforge.net/projects/dthymnbook/files/hymnbook.pdf/download.

Suggested artwork for covers:

• The Carrow Psalter from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
  • Priest elevating host at Mass http://www.flickr.com/photos/medmss/6166398834/
  • King David kneeling in prayer before the altar under the hand of God http://www.flickr.com/photos/medmss/6166399096/

The Mass Book

This is the book I was working on first. It is specific to a particular community but hopefully may be useful to others too.

• Words to [Hymns]
• [Order of Mass]
• [Litanies, Novenas and other devotions] held in common
• [Gregorian Chant]
• [Readings] for Sundays and Major Feasts
• [Benediction]
• A short guide to [The Sacrament of Penance]

Related Projects

St Edmund Campion Missal and Hymnal by Corpus Christi Watershed - pretty much just like what I was trying to do, but with a budget, colour plates, American basis. A Sunday Missal plus Kyriale plus translations of staple choir motets plus hymns plus lots of other stuff. They're aiming at $17 per copy - which is very amazing.

Small Church Music a collection of hymns with recordings and sheet music. There is also a facility for accessing copyright works.

Also ehymnal for a group slowly digitizing the English Hymnal.

The Catholic Choir Book is an amazing project. How to train up a choir to sing polyphony. Ideally, this would be the way to go. The books are available but all the support webpages seem to be stalled. They were going to join with Choral Tracks to provide training recordings, but that seems to be proceeding on its own tangent.

Vatican II Hymnal a huge hymnbook with all the readings for Sundays and Major Feasts in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite as well as the sung propers. It says it has the full text of the Mass in both OF and EF, but not the readings for EF.

Parish Book of Chant from CMAA