About Cælum Press

Cælum Press is an imprint of Writers.com Books which began in 2003 as an offshoot of Writers On the Net/Writers.com, an online writing school established in 1995. Our goal is to publish books that appeal to those who seek, those who look beyond the mundane.

Cælum is a Latin word meaning both "sky, heaven" and "tool with a sharp beveled point, used in engraving or carving stone." (You'll sometimes see this latter definition over-simplified to "chisel.") It can be "properly" pronounced several ways:

KAI-lum
SEE-lum
CHEE-lum
che-loom

The "hard k" (1) version is classical Latin. That's the Latin usually taught in school and is a based on the pronunciation used from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 100. The s (2) version is from vulgate Latin (the spoken language of the Roman Empire dating from the second and third century until Latin merged Romance languages) when palatalization of the k-sound into the s-sound before the vowels ae, e, and i became dominant. Ecclesiastical Latin, the pronunciation usually used in the Roman Catholic church, has the ch-sound (3). This inclination toward a modern Italianate pronunciation of Latin, has never been made official, although Pius X expressed this preference. Yet another variation of this pronunciation (4) is often used when singing.

In classical Latin, ae, was a true diphthong, and was sounded as ai (as in aisle or the German Kaiser). It later evolved to the e-sound. With our name, Cælum Press, we like to re-create the diphthong with the ligature æ which has a solid typographical history. This is not, however, always feasible and Caelum Press is acceptable.

The symbol you see in the logo (upper left corner of your screen) under most of the word press has an even more ancient meaning. It is the Egyptian hieroglyph for their word meaning "sky."

More cælum notes:

The misspelling "coelum" was once common, but it is incorrect. It stems from an etymological error made during the Renaissance.

The English words ceiling, celestial, and coelostat all stem from caelum.

There is a constellation named Cælum in the southern hemisphere. It was as such by Nicolas-Louis de La Caille in 1752. He was referring to the "tool" meaning.

You can hear the Roman proverb Fiat justitia, ruat cælum ("Let justice be done though the heavens fall.") in the online version of the Merriam Webster Dictionary. (The classical pronunciation is used.)

Here are three famous cælum quotations:
- Caelum non animum mutant qui.
  (They change their skies but not their souls who run across the sea.) -- Horace, Epistles, I. xi. 27
- Caelum videre iussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus.
  (He bid them look at the sky and lift their faces to the stars.) -- Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1. 85-86
- Tollimus in caelum curvato gurgite, et idem Subducta ad manes imos descendimus unda.
  (We are carried up to the heaven by the circling wave, and immediately the wave subsiding, we descend to the lowest depths.) -- Virgil, The Aeneid (III, 564)