For the past few decades, evangelical books regularly have appeared in secular bestseller lists, and some now rank among the bestselling books in American history. What made this possible? During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the contemporary evangelical public came into being, drawing together Christians from diverse liturgical, theological, denominational, and geographical contexts. Since then, that public's blurry edges and ambiguous religious identities have made evangelicals an ideal group of consumers. Highlighting the business side of an evangelical history typically centered on ministers and parachurch organizations, "Book People" argues that twentieth-century evangelical publishers not only have capitalized upon the emergence of this peculiar religious public but also helped constitute it. By cultivating new institutional networks, by establishing new nodes of cultural exchange, by circulating shared discourses, by elevating evangelical celebrities, and by presenting social worlds into which diverse Protestants could imagine themselves, evangelical publishers attained remarkable commercial success and situated books as lodestones of evangelical culture. In the process, they helped evangelicals to look like a people.