Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) was a powerful Scottish Presbyterian preacher, a voluminous author, and perhaps the greatest hymn writer that Scotland has ever produced—yet few today have directly benefited from his many contributions to evangelical faith and life.

According Iain Murray, Horatius Bonar “is one of the greatest of the little-known evangelical leaders,” and he is so obscure to most “because many of his writings have long been rare and unobtainable.”

Joel Beeke likewise has high esteem for Bonar and his writings: “I have been collecting and reading Horatius Bonar’s writings for 35 years and have always found him to be unparalleled in Gospel clarity. He is simple yet profound, and always insightful. Bonar is particularly gifted at reasoning with unbelievers and removing doubts of believers.”

C. H. Spurgeon wrote of Bonar’s The Everlasting Righteousness; or, How Shall Man Be Just with God?, a book that I read in seminary with much profit, it is

a rich book, suggestive, gracious, full of holy unction. Unlike many writers of the Evangelical school Dr. Bonar is not content with baling out milk for babes, but gives us real thought and teaching. There never was any need that orthodoxy and platitudes should go together, but they often have done so; no one can bring that charge in reference to this work. We say to all our friends, read and be refreshed.

This collection brings together all of Horatius Bonar’s extant writings, many of which have never been published in print. In all it is 137 volumes:

• 41 books
• 14 volumes of hymns and poems
• 5 volumes of biographical material
• 29 volumes of letters, manuscripts, and tracts
• 25 volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Prophecy
• 21 volumes of The Christian Treasury
• a photo gallery
• an audio lecture

Place your pre-order now to help bring these rich writings to a new generation of Christians—and to many generations to come.

Read more about Horatius Bonar in your Libronix library:

• J. D. Douglas, “Bonar, Horatius (1808–1889),” Who’s Who in Christian History, ed. J. D. Douglas, Philip W. Comfort, Donald Mitchell (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1992).
• A. T. B. McGowan, “Bonar, Horatius (1808–1889),” Encyclopedia of the Reformed Faith, ed. Donald K. McKim and David F. Wright (Lousville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 38.
• K. B. E. Roxburgh, “Bonar, Horatius,” Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, ed. Timothy Larsen, D. W. Bebbington, Mark A. Noll, and Steve Carter (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003), 61–63.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Protestant Reformer John Calvin. For several years we have had Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes available, but there is a large portion of Calvin’s writings that we don’t yet have (e.g., his collected writings in Latin span 59 dense volumes!). So we decided that 2009 was the perfect time to work on digitizing as much of Calvin’s corpus as possible—and to update our existing Calvin material.

Seven New Calvin Collections

We are excited to make available for pre-order seven new Calvin collections:

• The Calvin 500 Collection (97 Vols.)
• Calvin’s Commentaries (46 Vols.)
• The Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin: English, Latin, and French (9 Vols.)
• The Letters of John Calvin (4 Vols.)
• Tracts and Treatises of John Calvin (8 Vols.)
• John Calvin Biography Collection (10 Vols.)
• Calvin and the History of Calvinism (20 Vols.)

The Calvin 500 Collection contains all of the volumes from the other six collections and is an unbelievable value. It offers an additional 50% off the cumulative Pre-Pub prices for the individual collections—which themselves are already priced very low! It’s 97 volumes, nearly 40,000 pages (!), and currently just $299.95. That makes this the lowest priced Pre-Pub (in terms of price per page) that we have ever offered! In short, this is an amazing deal that you won’t want to pass up.

If you already own our earlier editions of Calvin’s Commentaries and Institutes, don’t worry. There’s an upgrade collection available that offers you an even lower price based on what you already own—and you’ll get all of the newly updated content at no additional charge.

Calvin’s Sermons

What about Calvin’s sermons? Most of Calvin’s extant sermons were translated into English in the late 1500s, but 16th-century English uses different spelling, and the majority of these volumes haven’t been updated to modern English spelling. We’re in the process of evaluating our options for a Calvin Sermons Collection and hope to be able to put it on Pre-Pub in the near future.

Additional Titles

The literature by and about Calvin is as massive as the great Reformer’s influence has been. It’s possible that we missed important books in our research, so we may add additional volumes to many of these collections over the next few months. That means the prices will probably have to go up to cover the additional production costs, so you’ll definitely want to pre-order early to lock in the lowest price! If you pre-order now, any additional volumes that we add to these collections will essentially be free!

Calvin500.com

In conjunction with the release of these new collections, we’ve also just launched a brand new website: Calvin500.com. We’ve done a fair bit of research on Calvin, so we thought we’d share it with you. You’ll find information about Calvin, bibliographies of Calvin’s works and literature on Calvin, a list of all Calvin 500 conferences, a page that tracks all Twitter mentions of John Calvin, and some fun stuff like a Calvin quiz and a couple of birthday countdown widgets. There’s also a blog where we will post news and announcements. Be sure to subscribe to the Calvin 500 feed to stay in the loop.

Blogging at Conferences

By the way, if you’re planning to attend any of the Calvin conferences this year and would like to blog the conference at Calvin500.com—or even if you blog about them on your own blog—let us know. We’d love to feature you on our site.

Go check out the new site and collections, and help us spread the word by blogging about it or mentioning it on Facebook, Twitter, and the other social networking sites you frequent.