Puritan Paperbacks

The Puritan Paperbacks are a series published by the Banner of Truth Trust, a non-profit Reformed publisher founded in 1957. Each title takes a seventeenth-century work that existed only in folios or Victorian collected editions and puts it back in print as a small book an ordinary reader can finish.

Two editorial decisions define the series. Spelling and punctuation are modernised, and the text is sometimes lightly abridged. That is a genuine trade: an abridged Owen is not the whole Owen, and what you gain is a book you will actually read to the end. For most readers that trade is obviously worth making. For close study of a particular author, the unabridged collected works exist for exactly that reason.

The result is short books on the subjects the Puritans wrote about most searchingly: sin, assurance, providence, suffering, contentment, temptation and communion with God. Across the 64 titles the page counts run from 88 to 384, with a median of 216.

Start with The Bruised Reed by Richard Sibbes. It is short, warm, and entirely about Christ's gentleness toward weak believers, which makes it the gentlest way into the series. After that, The Doctrine of Repentance by Thomas Watson is the most readable route into serious doctrine.

Do not begin with Owen. The Mortification of Sin is probably the most important title the series carries and it is the wrong first one. Read two or three of the warmer writers, get used to how a seventeenth-century sentence is built, and Owen will repay you far better later. A full reading order is set out in the best Puritan books for beginners, and how to read the Puritans deals with the prose itself.

Twenty-six authors are represented across the 64 titles, and six of them account for most of the shelf. John Owen has thirteen, more than any other, and is the most demanding. Thomas Watson, Richard Sibbes and John Bunyan have six each, Thomas Brooks five, and John Flavel four.

They do not read alike, and picking the right author matters more than picking the right title. Watson is the most quotable, Sibbes the gentlest, Brooks the most practical, Flavel the most pastoral, and Owen the one worth working up to. Every author has a hub page gathering their titles and quotes.

There is no single product that ships all 64 titles together. The series is sold title by title, which is part of why it stays affordable, and most readers build the shelf over years rather than buying a full set at once.

If you want several at once, the closest things to a boxed set are the Puritan Classics box set, which gathers fifteen of these works in cloth-bound hardbacks, and the Treasures of John Owen box set. Both are compared alongside the unabridged collected works on the Puritan sets page. For a smaller start, the Pocket Puritans are shorter and cheaper still.