You should correct your post. Is it the ELCA hymnal or a Lutheran hymnal? (a little Lutheran humor for you) At any rate, I have the new LCMS hymnal, Lutheran Service Book, and it's a fantastic production. A little bit of bad music made it in, but it's mostly good Lutheran hymnody. A HUGE improvement over Lutheran Worship as well, since it now has sensible harmonizations for hymns.

Catholics have spent billions (is that possible? Maybe) on making and selling hymnals for 50 years and even now there is nothing on the mainstream market that comes close to comparing to what is in the pew at the local Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches right down the street. Sometimes I wonder if anyone at GIA or OCP in charge of this stuff has ever visited another local church outside the Catholic Church just to see what it is like. The gap between the two is vast and embarrassing. We don't even have in print, right now, a decent collection of a few hundreds English hymns in four parts useful for the liturgical year without bowdlerized texts and with good arrangements. My own frustration with OCP happens without fail on a weekly basis: bad arrangements, no arrangements, crazy mixed up wacky arrangements, mismatched texts between missalette and choral edition, missing verses, changed keys, funky rhythms, peculiar typesetting, and, of course, the thing that drives me completely nuts, the strange assumption on the part of Catholic publishers that the people are too ignorant to sing anything other than the the melody, no matter what. The whole enterprise is a mixed up mess.

Just try an experiment. Take your parish's own hymnal or whatever it is to the local Lutheran music person and see what she or he says about it. It will be something like, "this is your hymnal?" or "but where is your hymnal?"

one particularly aweful hymnal is the one for the SPPX. type setting is great and there are some nice tunes but whoever harmonized them really needs to go into treatment (or first year theory class). very very sloppy on someones part.
isnt it interesting how the mainline protestants can fit their entire hymnody into a managable hard cover but we catholics have to pile on the dredge (something for everyone etc etc) so much so that accompaniment and choir editions need hydrolifts just to hold them.

whats horrible jeffry is that (apart from pbc obviously) it probably IS the best thing going.

See another thread, the CMAA doesn't exist to publish hymnals, run colleges, give certification, etc. It's incumbent upon the members to do that, as Noel, the Cathedral Chant School, and others are doing.

The PBC IS a hymnal, anyway. That belongs in every Catholic pew worldwide (and I despise the practice of buying it "for the schola" - this is the song of the people!)

<comment class="definitely-unintelligent-but-perhaps-civil">Making a smoothie out of it would be a minus on multiple levels, methinks…&lt/comment>

really? really? Is it the thing?

Well, that seems like a great idea, but two questions come to mind:
1. Copywright issues
2. I think it would be good to have a real hymnal, nicely bound like the Adoremus. A copied think off of the internet does not have the permance of a good-looking hymnal.
3. The title of "Parish Book of Hymns" would be perfect - make it look like a companion to the PBC!! Put both in the pew!
I think this kind of hymnal with the parts, as Jeffery described is so needed.

I would buy in a minute. It might be an opportune time, given the number of parishes having to make changes due to the new mass translations. I know personally I am thinking of that in the context of what is coming soon.

ideally you wouldn't want dozens of versions in the same parish ;)

Nor would there by an incentive to change hymn numbers precisely because that would devalue the overall product. In any case, I'm just speculating about a possible future that is nowhere near.

In any case, the main point is that all of these hymns would be permanently freed into the commons along with their typesetting -- and they are most of the hymns that have stood the test of time.