Ask Phil Bujnowski about the best-selling titles at his Mustard Seed Christian Bookstore, and one of the first books he takes off the shelf is "Dear Heart, Come Home: The Path of Midlife Spirituality" by Joyce Rupp.
That makes sense. Rupp is a Roman Catholic nun, and Bujnowski's store is across from Loyola University's lakeshore campus. He sees a lot of Catholics coming in, looking for books.But Rupp is also a feminist who has been described as a "spiritual midwife." Her books aren't about dogma but about living everyday life with a greater sense of its spiritual dimension. And many of her readers aren't Catholic.
Most of Kathleen Norris' readers aren't Catholic either. Of course, neither is she. She is Presbyterian. Yet she wrote her national best seller, "The Cloister Walk," about a journey of spiritual discovery during her lengthy stays at a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota. That and her other two poetic and deeply felt books appeal to readers from all religious backgrounds - including many of Bujnowski's customers.
"People are looking for depth," he says. "They're looking for something meaty."
The books at Mustard Seed cover the vast array of religious faith and spirituality. There are, for example, the works of T.D. Jakes, a bishop of the Higher Ground Assemblies whose written and spoken words (on cassettes and videos) are very popular among charismatic Christians, particularly African-Americans.
In Bujnowski's store, Jakes' "Woman, Thou Art Loosed: Healing the Wounds of the Past" is around the corner from a section of Pentecostal works on the battle with Satan, including "A Woman's Guide to Spiritual Warfare" by Quin Sherrer and Ruthanne Garlock. Nearby is the always popular children's section where, prominently displayed, are "A Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah's Wife" and a half-dozen other large colorful picture books from Jewish Lights Publishing of Woodstock, Vt.
And just a step away, in a large section, in one of the most prominent spots in the store, are those all-time best sellers: the Bibles.
There are literally hundreds of them.
The wide variety and large number of titles in Bujnowski's well-stocked store hint at an often-overlooked fact about the American book trade in the 1990s: While the rest of the industry has experienced only sluggish growth, religious books are in the midst of a boom that just won't quit.
"The religion category has been the success story of book publishing of the '90s," says Lynn Garrett, the religion book editor for Publishers Weekly.
Between 1993 and 1997, the number of religious books purchased by Americans increased 52 percent, from 60 million to nearly 92 million, according to survey data in the recently released annual Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing, conducted for the Book Industry Study Group.
By contrast, the rest of the industry saw growth of just 5 percent.
"There's been a real surge in the search for meaning, an eruption in matters of the spirit," says Matthew Gilbert, managing editor of the NAPRA ReView, a bimonthly periodical, based in Washington State, that tracks trends in the New Age market.
That surge is even more spectacular when viewed over a longer period. Since 1991, the number of religious books bought in the U.S. has risen by 150 percent. Yet, not all types of religion books have experienced the same level of growth. New Age books, for instance, saw an increase of 107 percent, according to the NPD Group Inc., the firm that conducts the annual survey for the Book Industry Study Group.
Of course, 107 percent growth over a six-year period is nothing to sneeze at, but it's an irony that New Age, which pioneered the connection between spirituality and personal growth, a connection to be found in many religious works today, is running behind the rest of the religion market. In some ways, though, it's a measure of the success of those earlier New Age books.
"Ideas that used to be called New Age are now considered mainstream," says Garrett. "The main one is that eclecticism, the notion that you can combine beliefs and practices from a variety of religions."
Gilbert describes this eclecticism as "a buffet approach to spirituality."
One of the surprises in the book-purchasing studies since 1991 has been that the greatest percentage gain among religious books has been in the subcategory of Bibles/prayer books. The number of Bible and prayer book purchases has risen by 174 percent, compared with 165 percent increases in inspirational books and in devotional books.
Sure, most American homes have at least one Bible. And, true, Bibles are often gifts for such turning points in life as a First Communion, a graduation or a marriage. But none of that explains the wildfire growth in Bible sales.
For part of the explanation, you have to look at marketing.
Twenty years ago, most sales involved plain-text Bibles - the inspired words and nothing else. But, then, in the 1980s, religious book publishers thought they saw a way to boost sales by combining the Bible (in whatever translation was most apt) with what might otherwise have been published as a separate study guide. Attractive and colorful covers (instead of the traditional black with the words "Holy Bible" in gold) were put on these hybrids - called specialty or niche Bibles - and the results, says Cris Doornbos of religion-publishing giant Zondervan, were often amazing.
In one experiment in 1992, three of Zondervan's devotional Bibles were put on the shelves of Wal-Marts around the country, and, in 12 days, 189,000 were sold.
"We knew we'd hit a chord," Doornbos says.
Today, alongside foreign-language Bibles and the various English translations and paraphrases, the Mustard Seed offers such study Bibles as the Spirit-Filled Life Bible, the Passage of Life Bible, the Personal Growth Study Bible, the Life Application Bible, the Inspirational Study Bible (Max Lucado, a religion book star, as general editor), the Open Bible, the Experiencing God Bible, the True Love Waits Bible (concerned with encouraging celibacy among unmarried teens), the Serendipity Bible and a matched set from Zondervan including the Couple's Devotional Bible, the Woman's Devotional Bible (two versions), the Men's Devotional Bible and Recovery Devotional Bible.
But there's more going on here than better packaging. Millions of Americans are looking for, hungering for, a more understandable and accessible Bible - and for religion books of all sorts that are easier to get into and to grasp.
"A lot of what people thought was religion was judgmental," Doornbos says. "What a lot of the books used to do (was), they'd give you the answers to all the questions you haven't asked yet.
"We have created books that deal with truth and grace. It's a much more gracious style and tone."
But there's something else at work here as well, notes Stuart Matlins, the publisher of those colorful Jewish Lights children's books on the shelves in Bujnowski's store.
"There is a heightened interest in matters of faith that is caused by the tremendous amount of intermarriage in our society," Matlins says. "It's really a fundamental change.
"My wife's parents were married in '46 or '47. She was from Church of the Brethren, and he was a Sicilian Catholic. He was excommunicated, and her family kind of ignored them. But today we're interacting with people of other faiths, and you're no longer ostracized."
The more that people of different faiths interact with each other, the more they want to know about each other, and the more they want to read about each other.
And, like the rest of the book industry, Jewish Lights, which publishes books on mysticism, the Holy Land and similar topics for adults as well as stories for children, has worked to fill that need.
"I founded Jewish Lights in 1990," Matlins says. "We're nobody. We're not Random House. (But) we've published 85 books since 1990. And we'll ship a quarter of a million books this year.
"That's a lot of books for a nobody."