This is for the EF. A decent number of congregants would sing, I believe, but it's hard to gauge what concrete percentage would look like. Also, I'm hoping to increase that number, whatever it is. There isn't a price breakpoint, so I'm not too worried about having to obtain more, but I'm just trying to get a feel for what would be the ideal ratio of books to people at this point for an initial purchase.

likely to remain stocked

A dangerous assumption: many hymnals undergo tacit revisions between printings, and I've had to deal with conflicting psalm pointings in the Methodist Hymnal. A neighboring parish has a mixed set of Canto y Flores in which not only most of the words but the notated rhythms have changed, quite a disaster for the choir.

Are they going IN the pews?
You could easily do 1 or 2 per built-in book holder.

It's a question. A durable book in the pews makes one sort of statement and the amount of care invested in a one-time bulletin makes another; I'm not sure how the costs compare. My predecessor pasted a short supplement of his favorites in the back of our hymnals, and now that we have seasonal inserts for the ICEL Mass I wish he had opted for pockets instead (we also have to distribute a half-sheet "Ecce panis" each year).

The posted example is attractive but assumes I know all but one of the tunes, and I that I wish to sing in unison- hmmph!

Buy enough to fill the pews. Our pews are repleat with catch-alls for placing hymnals, missalettes and other printed material. If you don't have anything like this then set something up at the entrances of the church, but secure enough hymnals or few extra so everyone has a book and there can then be no excuse for not singing. Personally looking on with someone can do in a pinch but it's hard to read the small print at an angle, especially if you have bifocals.

Hymnals if you choose a good one can give you many years of service whereas service bulletins are nice but the cost to copy and your time to prepare them each week or month could be more costly in the long run, IMHO.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't being able to use the pew bulletin method contingent on having enough copies of the music bought? Is there a licensing method to allow you to do this?

You can pay the three major crooks - excuse me, publishers - extra for permission to copy the music you already paid for once in the hymnals you bought from them.

Or you can use public domain/creative commons music. (Which is usually better, anyways.)

We have a set of St. Edmund Campion missals that are rolled out on a book cart on the Sundays we have Latin Mass.
The organist chooses the entrance and exit hymns, and I add them to this program layout that I wrote up for our Missae Cantata. I put them on a little table that is set out beside the books, which otherwise just holds a basket of veils.


-screen print from doc, sorry for highlighted stuff - I tend to do 2 of these on a landscape layout and so just nice little half sheets for everyone

This following is the format I had started with, but I wasn't sure that it was worth the ink, since people just put them back in the stack after Mass.



(This is for those Sundays at a host church - each of the priests and we who sing are from another parish in the area, but there's a 1st and 3rd Sunday TLM at this other church, so the books actually belong to the Latin Mass "community" and not the host church.)