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Catholic Books Direct

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Help Center

Welcome to the Help Center! We’ve compiled answers to some of the most frequent questions we receive on this page.

Can’t find an answer to your question here? No problem! Contact our customer service team for assistance.

Orders

To keep our overhead low and provide our customers with the lowest possible price, we only accept orders via our website. We cannot accept orders via any other means.

If you are tax-exempt, please place your order through our website, then send an email to customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com including your order number and a copy of your tax exemption certificate. Upon receipt of this information, the sales tax on your order will be refunded.

Before contacting us, please use your receipt to verify that you were actually charged sales tax. We are not required to collect sales tax in most states.

If you are a Catholic parish or Diocesan office, we can extend Net 30 terms for payments.

We require that your first order be prepaid online via credit card or PayPal before Net 30 terms are extended.

If you already have an account and have previously placed a prepaid order, please email customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com to place your order.

We sell new books sourced directly from the publisher or authorized distributors. We do not deal in used books of any kind.

We are not able to add promotions, special offers, or free items to orders after the order has already been placed.

If you need a reminder of the promo code relating to a particular special offer, or you run into trouble using the promo code, please contact our customer service team for assistance at customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com.

Provided your order has not been processed for shipment by our warehouse, we are generally able to cancel and refund items upon request.

We are not able to add items to an order after it is placed. This is for your security – our system does not retain your credit card information after the card is charged.

However, if you place a second order, we would be happy to consolidate the two orders if possible. Simply send us an email with the new order number and we can arrange for the two to be consolidated and for the shipping charge on your second order to be refunded (if applicable).

We get many inquiries regarding orders individuals have placed directly with the publishers whose books we carry.

While our catalog includes books published by many different publishing companies, we are a completely independent company. We do not own the publishing houses and do not process their orders.

If your order was not placed with Catholic Books Direct, we cannot help you with it and cannot assist you with finding contact information for the company you ordered with. Please contact the company you ordered from for assistance.

Shipping

We offer two shipping methods, Economy Shipping and Expedited Shipping.

Economy Shipping

The vast majority of Economy shipments arrive in 1 week or less. However, we cannot provide shipping time guarantees for this service.

Expedited Shipping

Expedited shipping provides 2-4 business day delivery to any address in the US.

We offer two shipping methods, Economy Shipping and Expedited Shipping.

Economy Shipping

Most economy shipments ship via USPS Media Mail or USPS Ground Advantage, with the exception of large orders shipping to churches or commercial addresses (which generally ship via FedEx Ground or UPS Ground).

Expedited Shipping

Most expedited orders ship via USPS Priority Mail, FedEx, or UPS.

Sorry, we do not offer an overnight shipping option.

Our fastest shipping option is Expedited service, which provides guaranteed 2-4 business day service to any address in the US.

Currently, we are not able to ship outside the USA and Canada.

Yes. All shipments to PO boxes are sent via US Postal Service, as UPS/FedEx cannot deliver to a PO box.

Because many of the orders we process are gifts, we do not include receipts with pricing with shipments. A packing slip is enclosed showing the name and address of the person who placed the order and the items in the order.

If you are ordering a gift, or a retailer “drop-shipping” to your customer, there is no need to request a gift receipt as pricing is never included with shipments.

We are able to ship to correctional facilities, but cannot guarantee timely delivery.

Please contact the facility before placing your order to determine their policies regarding book shipments. Some correctional facilities have restrictions – for instance, many will not accept hardcover books.

To ensure that our warehouse can process your order quickly and accurately, we only permit one shipping address per order. If you’d like to ship to multiple addresses (for example, if you’d like to buy one book for yourself and another to ship to a friend as a gift), you would need to place two separate orders.

Backorders & Special Orders

If you see a book on our website that is not currently in stock, or you wish to order more than we have available, please feel free to place an order for as many copies as you’d like.

Upon receipt of your order, our automated system will determine if the book you’ve ordered is already on the way to our warehouse. If it’s not, we will purchase additional copies from the publisher. Either way, your books will ship to you immediately after they arrive back in stock at our warehouse.

The vast majority of backorders are filled within 14 days.

In the rare case where we learn that a backorder will be extended for more than 2 weeks (for instance, if the publisher is out of stock and reprinting a book), we will send you an email notification right away to make sure you are comfortable with the longer timeframe.

No! Please do not order a book that is not in stock if you need it urgently! While most backorders arrive in 1-2 weeks, we cannot make any promises as to a specific ship date until the books arrive in stock.

Returns

We accept returns for any reason within 30 days of delivery for a full refund of the price of the product or replacement product.

If the return is due to an error on our part (for example, if you receive a defective product or the wrong product), we will provide a pre-paid label that can be used for return shipping. For discretionary returns, we require that the customer pay for return shipping.

Please view our Returns page for our full returns policy.

How to request a return 

  1. Log in to your Catholic Books Direct account (click here to log in)
  2. In the Email field, enter your email address, and then click Continue.
  3. In your email, open the email sent from our store and copy the six-digit verification code included in the email.
  4. Enter the six-digit verification code you received in your email where requested in the login screen.
  5. Click on the order that you want to submit the return for.
  6. If your order has more than one item, then select the items that you want to return.
  7. Select the return reason and add a note if needed.
  8. Click Request return.

Your return request will be reviewed and approved by our team to ensure it is in line with the policies listed below. If there are multiple options to resolve the return (for example, a case where we may replace or refund an item), we will contact you via email to determine the appropriate resolution.

Once your return request is approved, you will receive an automated email with instructions for the return.

If you prefer not to use the automated returns process, you may also email us at customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com to request a return.

If you haven’t received your order, we’d recommend following these steps. We find that 9 times out of 10, following these steps will locate a lost package:

  • Please allow an additional business day after the item is scanned as delivered. Occasionally we see packages marked scanned as delivered by the carrier one day before they actually are delivered.
  • Check any hiding places outside where your mail carrier may have left a package.
  • Check with any family members, neighbors, or apartment building offices that may have received the package and forgotten to tell you about it.
  • If you are trying to locate a USPS shipment, call your local post office with your USPS tracking number. (We know nobody likes to call the post office, but you would be amazed at how often a quick call to the post office leads to a package being located!)

If you are unable to find your shipment after following these steps, please email us at customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com and we’d be happy to assist.

Products and Pricing

We’d be happy to try! Send us an email at customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com and we’ll do our best. Please note, though, that as we have over 4,000 books to choose from, we aren’t experts in all of them and our information is often limited to what’s already available on our website.

If the book you’re looking for is published by one of the publishers in our catalog, absolutely! Send us an email at customerservice@catholicbooksdirect.com, and if possible, we will special order it for you.

Unfortunately we are not able to special-order titles from publishers we do not currently carry.

Rather than providing coupons, we discount everything we sell! Every book on our website is discounted from the publisher’s suggested retail price. We do occasionally offer special sales and recommend signing up for our newsletter to be notified when these sales occur.

All pictures available are on our website. If you are looking for additional pictures beyond what is on our site, we recommend visiting the publisher’s website. As many books in our warehouse are shrink-wrapped or otherwise packaged, we cannot take additional pictures of books by request.

Our catalog is available entirely online at CatholicBooksDirect.com. We do not offer a paper catalog.

Liturgical Materials

If you’re purchasing a Missal to use at a Traditional Latin Mass (also known as the Tridentine Mass or Extraordinary Form), you want to purchase a Missal that uses the 1962 edition of Missale Romanum.

Please note that many Missals for the Ordinary Form of the Mass also contain Latin. (For instance, the Daily Roman Missal.) This is because the Ordinary Form can be – and often is – prayed in Latin. However, those Missals will not be appropriate for the Traditional Latin Mass / Extraordinary Form Mass.

 

The Missals below are according to the 1962 edition of Missale Romanum and are appropriate for use at a Traditional Latin Mass.

 

Daily Missals:

Daily Missal 1962 (Baronius Press)

 

Missal Booklets:

Latin-English Booklet Missal (Coalition Ecclesia Dei)

Latin-English Sunday Missal (Roman Catholic Books)

 

Spanish Missal Booklets:

Misalito Latin-Espanol (Coalition Eccelsia Dei)

Misalito Latin-Espanol Para Rezar La Misa Tradicional Por Los Novios (Coalition Ecclesia Dei)

 

Children’s Missals:

My See and Pray Missal (St. Benedict Press)

Latin Mass Children’s Missal (St. Benedict Press)

The edition numbering on the Daily Roman Missal can be a bit confusing, because the Daily Roman Missal and the Roman Missal (Missale Romanum) have different edition numbers (currently the 7th and the 3rd respectively).


If you’re interested in all the details, we have an entire 
blog post about the edition numbering of the Daily Roman Missal. But the short answer is: we only sell the latest (7th) edition of the Daily Roman Missal. If you purchase from us, you are getting the latest and greatest!

The Daily Roman Missal (and the Spanish edition, Misal Romano Diario), as well as the St. Joseph Sunday Missal contain all readings for the A/B/C Liturgical cycle, so it can be used as long as the translation of the Mass has not changed, if you note what the liturgical cycle for the current year is.

While daily Missals do contain a “calendar” for easy look-up of the current year’s Liturgical cycle, this is just for convenience and you can keep using the Missal long after the calendar has passed.

The Daily Roman Missal combines all readings and prayers for Sunday, Sunday vigil, and daily Masses in a single, portable volume. It contains the Mass in both Latin and English.


The Saint Joseph Missals are divided into three volumes: one containing Sunday Masses and two containing Daily Masses.


Since the Saint Joseph Missals are split into multiple volumes, many customers find them easier to carry to Mass than the combined Daily Roman Missal.