I thoroughly endorse "The Organists Manual", especially for someone who is already a decent pianist. It's what I used (and am still using).

The "Organ Technique: Modern and Early" has great exercises and pieces, and I appreciate how it breaks everything down for you.

I highly recommend the "red book". I used it, and I use it with my organ students.

I used the "red book." I'm still not a good organist, but that was not due to the book. It is simple to follow, thorough and affordable.

The Davis book in my opinion is excellent because the repertoire is diverse and well-selected, the pieces are long enough as to be satisfying and useful when learned and yet not so long so as to make the student feel overwhelmed, and the pieces are high quality and represent the best composers of each era (Scheidt, Bach, Vierne, Matthias, etc.)

I would also add that the pieces are well-edited, and Davis doesn't try to impose one particular style of playing, at least so far as I can remember.

One of the problems I have with the Gleason method is he heavily edited and fingered early music pieces with legato fingerings (substitutions and the like) as a "teaching tool", whereas I assert that one should be taught the proper performance practice for the style of the piece.

+1 to the Ritchie/Stauffer recommended by Jeffrey Coggins. I have an old edition of the Gleason, and it looks pretty good too. However, I still prefer the former, which was (and still is) my text.

The James R. Jennings edition listd at CPDL is available here, although you will have to download the NWC viewer (link at that site) to view and print it out.

Thank you! the Jennings edition is just what we need, much appreciated.

While we're chatting -- do you have any suggestions for a pianist/organist who can't reach the footpedals? My chapel drafted me (pianist) as accompanist a couple years ago, and everything's going great except my feet dangle a couple inches above the footpedals -- is a shorter bench the answer? but then how does one play the manuals easily? Do short people not become organists?? I want to learn heel/toe pedaling -- but maybe toe alone is the best I can hope for? Any advice is welcome, thanks again.

Jeffrey, do you have a site where I can find them? sounds like a perfect solution, but all I could find on the internet are piano pedal extensions for small children. Thank you!

Don't overlook Sir John Stainer's late-19th-century primer, called simply The Organ (readily available secondhand, and quite possibly scanned into a PDF file somewhere on the Net by now). I have encountered some players who regard the Stainer book as contemptibly old-fashioned. More fools they. Stainer's pedal exercises, in particular, are really effective workouts, and are apt to reveal holes in one's technique which more glamorous and more recent productions often won't do.

When I was in school, all of the organs had adjustable benchs. (A couple just had wood blocks.) The wood blocks were more annoying, but obviously with so many organists using the organs, something was needed at every organ to adjust the bench. So there's the why, and the results were that everyone was happy and able to sit at the bench properly. I'm not sure why you would need an adjustable bench if you were the only one- wood blocks would be just fine if you never had to change it once it was set to the correct height.

Stainer, Sir John. The Organ at Google Books.

Many thanks for all your comments -- I needed a sanity check, because although books say "get bench at proper height," no one ever says what happens if you can't get it to the proper height. Bottomline seems to be that if the bench's not the right height for you, you have to somehow solve that problem to play the pedals correctly.

Given that I can't saw a few inches off the organ bench at our chapel -- or drill and screw extenders on the pedals, although that sounds great -- my solution is to get a bench made that fits me and learn the footpedals with Stainer's techniques. I'll worry about seeing the music and playing the manuals from 3 inches down later.....:).