by Christopher Hodapp

I have been incredibly remiss in not reporting this story from Masonic Week 2026. My friend and Brother Paul M. Rich has been named this year as Friar #114 in the Society of Blue Friars at Masonic Week 2026 in Alexandria, Virginia.

The Society of Blue Friars was founded in 1932 for the express purpose of recognizing outstanding Masonic authors throughout the world. Traditionally, the Society convenes each year during Masonic Week in the Washington, D.C. vicinity to induct a new Friar, and its gatherings are open to the public, unless the presenter specifies otherwise.

Authors like Arthur E. Waite, Harold V.B. Voorhis, Dwight L. Smith, Brent Morris, Allen Roberts, Thomas Jackson, Yasha Beresiner, Alain Bernheim, Robert G. Davis, Alton Roundtree, Mark Tabbert, Shawn Eyer, Michael R. Poll, Robert D. B. Cooper, Josef Wäges, Piers Vaughan, Adam Kendall and Rick Berman are just a few prior Blue Friar honorees. In a rare moment of weakness, they even let a Dummy in. (After all - their prior Abbott is an Idiot, so I was in good company.) 

Dr. Paul Rich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmGsy9dRuyI

Dr. Rich has an incredible life story and astonishing list of accomplishments, beyond his Masonic writings. Harvard professor, businessman, publisher, philanthropist, 

Westphalia Publishing, which has an enormous catalogue of Masonic related titles. Allow me to quote Shawn Eyer's introduction: 

"Paul Rich was born in Buffalo, New York, where his family has been connected with the food business and philanthropy for over 100 years. He entered Harvard from the Tonbridge School in England and got his AB kumlaude at Harvard where he was chair of the junior common room and secretary of the liberal union and he also got a Harvard master's degree in educational administration at Harvard. He worked for the Adlai Stevenson campaign and has been active in the Democratic Party for many years. He was a research professor at the University of Western Australia in Perth where he obtained his PhD and was on the university council for 13 years. He was head of supervisory programs at the Emirate ofQatar and adviser to the royal family. He was then a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and senior professor of the University of the Americas in Mexico, developing the country's largest postwar sculpture park. He's president of the policy studies organization and its Westfailia press in Washington which includes governments, think tanks and political science departments and is an advisory organization to the United Nations. It publishes well-known titles such as world affairs and world medical. Busfallia now publishes the entire Masonic Library collection, keeping all the titles since its inception in print. He is a life member of St. John's Lodge in Boston, both the northern and southern Scottish rights and numerous research lodges and collateral bodies. active in Harvard alumni activities. He is the author or editor of three dozen books, including several involving Freemasonry. Paul is life governor of Harris College in the University of Oxford. Past president of five Beta Delta International, recipient of the Cameron Medal Medal for Scholarship, Chancellor of Pi Alpha Alpha, fellow of the Royal Historical Society and fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries."

19th century Blue friars

they always had an owl as a symbol of wisdom at all their meetings and I'm presenting their owl to the new roof friars today that you may keep in a roost somewhere some watch. They also met with a chest and the um members were required to provide papers. The papers had to be on yellow paper which was distributed at meetings. If you fail to present a suitable paper, you were fined 12 bottles of the best quality wine. So during their lifetime these masonic uh driers who were in pro in in Plymouth in England produced over 150 papers. Uh in the books which we're pleased to let you have today uh are some of the papers uh and also some recipes because they were gourmets and attraction of the meeting was the cuisine. uh that more of that later, but this is probably the only Masonic book you will ever have with recipes. Uh and if you try them, you will find that they're pretty good after 150 years. They're not bad. Whether you want to have a chest and put your papers in it or pay the fine of 12 bottles of the best quality wine is entirely up to you. I uh I think that might drive away members. At any rate, a very good afternoon to you and I appreciate the honor. Many of my friends through the years have been in the friars and uh I uh really really do take it as an incentive to do more work. Uh I don't take it as a sort of retirement masonic version of golf. I think it's a more of a cheer squad for turning out more things.

by Christopher Hodapp

(Rated TL/RA: Too Long/Read Anyway)

Brother Cameron Bailey puts out an astonishing amount of Masonic essays online, and always tries to encourage thought-provoking discussions. Last July's entry, Is Freemasonry Brain Dead? based on a talk he had recently given, is a good delineation of the problem of publishing Masonic books these days, or at any other time in the last 300 years, for that matter. 

Publishers like Mike Poll at Cornerstone in Louisiana, Steve McCall at Macoy's in Virginia, and Paul Rich at Westphalia Press will tell you the quickest way to go broke is by believing Masons will actually buy Masonic books, much less read them. (The fact that I can name all three owners of all three major Masonic publishers in the U.S. says a lot about the tiny, specialized nature of Masonic book publishing.) The Scottish Rite Research Society's annual offerings are the one bright spot in North American Masonic publishing, but they only publish one major title a year (in addition to the hardback Heredom annual collection of papers, and from time to time, a title from the newly revived Masonic Book Club). The SRRS's model is very different from that of putting out several new full-length manuscripts, creating quality covers, printing up a stack, warehousing them forever, and praying like hell somebody actually buys enough of the damn things each year to maybe pay back the printing costs... eventually. 

And don't get me started on the topic of dwindling book advances and royalty payments to authors. That's a uuuge industry-wide disgrace that transcends just Masonic book publishing contracts. The only authors receiving big advance checks from the last three major book publishing houses left in the industry are politicians and celebrities—the high-visibility folks you hear about getting million-dollar writing advances for books that will sell less than 100,000 copies (mostly non-writers who will require a ghost writer just to deliver a manuscript on time). Average advances today are a fraction of what they were 20 years ago, if they're offered at all, and those multi-million dollar ones you hear about for ex-presidents to scribble down their memoirs result in the thousands of everyday authors who try to eke out a living getting nothing for their actual hard work. 

Freemasonry is a niche topic anyway, and the few remaining major publishing houses see no money in books about our favorite fraternity, unless some fluke comes along they think they can tap into (like the meteoric success of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code more than 20 years ago that resulted in 9 years of publishing mania, National Treasure, History Channel programs, and my own book, along with a gadazillion others).

The breakneck rise of Masonic podcasts and TikTok videos has only compounded the problem, along with the general public notion that anything more verbose than a two-line Facebook meme is disturbingly branded 'Too Long/Didn't Read.'

(Hell, even THAT'S too long for some, hence the acronym TL/DR).

Here's the way Brother Bailey puts it:

Is Freemasonry Brain Dead?

Considering this question, I have to conclude that no, our Ancient Craft isn’t quite Brain Dead. But, it is really close. We’re laying there in the hospital, hooked up to the machines, and our brain waves are barely registering on the monitor. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to step over that line and lose our ability to think.

Recently The Masonic Society closed its virtual doors forever, ensuring that the excellent Masonic Journal will never be published again.

If a Mason has an important message for our Craft, some insight that he finds valuable and that he has a burning desire to get out to everyone, he can, as men have always done, publish a book.

What does that look like in the Masonic world in 2025?

He can use a Print On Demand Publisher, which will price him out of the market, ensuring that he will sells no books.

Or he can take his manuscript to a book production company, and order enough copies to ensure that his final sales price is in keeping with the market. Say 1000 copies.

If he works hard, and is lucky, he’ll sell 100 copies. Leaving 900 copies to slowly rot in boxes in his garage, and leaving him with a large financial loss.

Is it any wonder then that so few new books about Freemasonry are published each year?

Is it any wonder then that real publishing companies won’t touch a book about Freemasonry with the proverbial ten foot pole?

Yet Freemasonry has around one million members in the United States.

How is it that a market of one million men won’t support the sales of one thousand books?

Why do we value knowledge so low?

If a Masonic book was ever to sell five thousand copies, it would be considered a bestseller. Five thousand copies sold to a market of one million men should not be out of the realm of possibility. But, in reality, we’ve never seen one of our books on the New York Times Bestseller list, and unless something radically changes in the Masonic world, we never will.

So is it any wonder that the only Masonic books published today are those published by institutions, like the Scottish Rite, or a tiny handful of men who are willing to subsidize, with large sums of their own money, their book projects?

Masonic book publishing is bad for writers. Really bad. Masonic periodicals, magazines and the like are even worse. Institutions can’t even keep them going, as shown by The Masonic Society and its fine Journal.

It is often said that Freemasonry takes a good man and helps him become an even better man.

Yet aren’t we missing one of the best and finest ways to effect that transformation if we have no means to compensate Masonic writers for their efforts?

For whatever reason, a reason that remains a complete mystery to me, the overwhelming number of Freemasons absolutely refuse to spend a nickel advancing knowledge within our Craft. . . 

Read the rest HERE.

The issue is far from new. Nineteenth century Masonic sage Albert Mackey penned the classic essay, "Reading Masons and Masons Who Do Not Read" some 150 years ago.

Even more troubling is the rise of A.I. "created" material that gets directly stolen from other previously published sources, often without regard for truth or accuracy (or legality, for that matter). Try as they might, Amazon is unable to keep up with policing its online marketplace from unscrupulous merchants who use A.I. to steal and slightly re-write entire books, slap a cheap cover on them, and sell them as a new work. I can't even make a stab at the flood of self-published books on Amazon that are just A.I. summaries of other works that clog up the legitimate listings.

In a recent survey done by the online industry publication BookBub, almost half of 1,200 surveyed authors admitted they are currently using A.I. as part of their work, at least for marketing and administrative tasks. That's certainly an ethical and economic usefulness that self-published authors will warmly embrace, because the "I wear all hats" aspect of publishing your own work can become an all-devouring brain killer when it comes to the herculean tasks of advertising and marketing your projects. Add up the hours of creating covers, writing promotional information, researching marketing strategies, creating ads, placing them on Facebook, Amazon and elsewhere, writing blogs or making podcasts and video clips to stay engaged with readers, getting review copies into the hands of folks who will actually read and comment on your book, checking in on Facetwit, Xwitter, InstaTok, WTF'sApp, and every other damned social media platform that's flashing across the brainpans and striking the short attention spans of the public at the moment, that doesn't leave much tine in the schedule for actually writing more damn books.

But more than half of the surveyed writers said they use generative AI in the actual creative writing process, either occasionally or frequently. And almost 70% said they are self-published, which means it's increasingly probable that no professional editor or independent fact-checker so much as looked their manuscripts over for accuracy, punctuation, or plagiarism. Admittedly, the majority of respondants were likely novelists instead of non-fiction authors, but the issue remains relevant, and will only get worse.

My husband Alice writes big, sprawling historical romance novels (400+ pages), and is getting ready to pull the trigger on releasing or rereleasing four of them using self-publishing tools. A recent blowup over generative AI use recently happened in the "romantasy" fiction world involving two relatively popular authors. Lena MacDonald's recent Darkhollow Academy: Year Two novel was released, and the author hadn't even bothered to proofread her own manuscript closely enough to see that the following message from ChatGPT actually appeared in the text when the book was published:

"I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements."

Zoinks! Busted! Not only for the embarrassment of letting her readers know she used AI to purportedly "improve" her own work, but that she deliberately used it to ape the style of another successful author in that genre! (Bree is the author of the paranormal romance series, The Tie That Binds.)

K.C. Crowne is the author of a series of "Mafia-romance" novels. Like MacDonald, her recent book, Dark Obsession contained the following cheerful response from ChatGPT after she had obviously asked it to improve a passage for her:

"Certainly! Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity."

 In both cases, the authors took to social media to explain away what was so obvious to readers. They both apologized for the appearance of the AI messages within their manuscripts, not because they thought there was anything unethical or even embarrassing about using a robot to do an author's job, but for their "mistakes" in letting readers peek under their skirts by skipping so much as a careful proofreading before putting their work up for sale.