About Us

Would you rather be half-faced or two-faced?

Whatever the case,
That's half the face
Behind Anabaptist Bookstore.
Read on to learn more.

My name is Mark Roth. And there's my full face with my wife Ruby and our three children still at home on December 15, 2009.

That changed on October 1, 2010, when Dora got married. So now we have three married children (six, actually, counting our children-in-law!) and four grandchildren. Here we are (two or three years ago).

But personal introductions aside....

Anabaptist Bookstore is a small, Web-only, home business which I launched on January 1, 1998,

to help support our family, and
to help finance Anabaptists (my original Web site), and
to provide the first online source of Anabaptist materials.

Anabaptist Bookstore sites

Each dollar you spend at our business generates 12-15 cents in profit. So you see, our profit margin is extremely narrow.

Thank you for each dollar you spend here!

I started as a one-man operation run on a shoestring. I'm still the only full-time worker. Ruby and Michayla do the packaging. Dora has been the most known to you because of the computer work she used to do for me. (Of course Dora no longer works for me since she's moved away.)

Eventually two of our three main competitors came online.

Milestone Ministries came online as a pre-existing, solid, established business. As I understand the arrangement, the owner is assisted by three other full-time workers (one of whom is one of my nephews!). They are a bigger operation than we and much better financed. They probably sell as much in a day as we sell in a week. And they offer very good service.

Some years after a then-Board-member declared they would never have a Web site, Christian Light Publications finally came online as a pre-existing corporation. I suppose we had been online for some ten years before their Web site hit its stride. Compared to us, they are giants, of course. I imagine they sell as much in a day as we sell in a month! (I honestly have no idea.) Their customer service is superb.

Of our three main "competitors," only Rod and Staff Publishers does not have a Web site. I don't even know an email address for them!

The "competition" among us is of the friendly, work-together type. Rod & Staff Publishers and Christian Light Publications are our main suppliers. They even do drop shipping for us when we request it. The folks at Milestone Ministries have been helpful the few times we've needed to get books faster than our regular suppliers can get them to us. (You see, Milestone is just down the road from us — not much over an hour's drive.)

Well, with that kind of powerhouse competition, we're grateful for every customer. We continue to shorten our shipping time and increase our customer service responsiveness. Our roster of unedited customer testimonials continues to grow, presently numbering many hundreds.

That said, I welcome your suggestions for improvement. And if I happen to owe you some sort of remedy, I really want to know so I can work with you to resolve your outstanding issue.

If you're one of those satisfied customers who has said so on our site, thank you very much! I would be very encouraged to have you tell your friends about us — forums, boards, blogs, email, word-of-mouth, social networks.

Anabaptist Bookstore is very small by comparison to the other three. But we are committed to rendering excellent service. By the grace of God, we will continue with our improvements in that area.

Oh, you want to learn a little more about me personally, you say? OK.

PS: When you're ready to purchase curriculum from Christian Light Education, please enter their site through ours. And a special thanks to all of you who have supported us by doing so!