About Grace & Truth Books
Who are Grace
& Truth Books? We are the family business of Dennis & Naomi Gundersen,
and our four boys, all of whom have made significant contributions to the
business. Our oldest son Ben, designing covers; David, who has worked for
us in packing orders and shipping / receiving. Mike, who designed our first
website and has traveled to countless homeschool conventions with Dennis;
and Greg, who is our resident artist, re-drawing cover art and inside book
sketches.
But before any of this came about, all of our married lives, Naomi and I
had dreamed of the idea of opening a Christian bookstore, even of becoming
a Christian book publisher. This vision was in our minds back in the 70’s,
long before any such thing as an online Christian book store existed!
Becoming an online Christian Book Store
It was in 1993 that our family first came across some of the great Christian
character-building children's books from the 1800’s, then owned
by Triangle Press. We were eager to distribute and become a book seller
to promote those titles! Little did we know that, in a few short years,
we would become their largest distributor of those books, and then, in a
few short years, that we would be buying that company and would dub them
all “Grace & Truth Books.”
Our company name, by the way, comes directly from a phrase in The Gospel
of John, chapter 1, verse 17: “grace and truth were realized through
Jesus Christ.” To my wife and I, it seemed that would be a marvelous
name for a bookstore: Grace & Truth! So in 1994, that’s what
we named our fledgling Christian book business.
Learning the art of Christian book publishing
Then it was in 1996 that a missionary we supported was hoping to find a
publisher to bring back into print his story about his work in a particular
tribal village in Papua New Guinea. So, in order to learn the art of publishing,
we embarked on printing his “In The Hearts of Wild Men”, and
learned how to go about publishing, if you will. Since then, we have become
the publishers of almost 80 books, primarily Christian
character building books for children
