Conceived over cocktails in a country club bar, Burke & Benedict Books soon matured into a thriving business. Fr. Niall Bresnahan's own prolific pen supplied the early catalog: Learning the Suscipiat: the Struggles of an Irish Altar Boy (1971), Non Serviam: The Contraceptive Mentality in Modern American Life (1972), and The Feel-Good Trap: How the Pursuit of Pleasure Leads to Despair (1972) all appeared within three years of that fateful golf outing.

In this period, he also contributed entertaining prefaces (many readers said they were his best work) for two books co-written with his stockbroker: Faith: Your Greatest Asset (1972), and The Rosary and Your Portfolio: Marian Investment Strategies (1973).

B&B Books added staff, moved to larger offices, and in early 1973 Bresnahan, perhaps sensing that his own well might soon run dry, made what turned out to be a very shrewd move: he asked his employees (all of them Catholic women) what mattered to them, as readers.

Bresnahan knew little of women (aside from sharing his bed in Angola with his housekeeper, a sin for which the Cardinal Patriarch had granted him a dismissive absolution), and he was surprised at the enthusiasm of his employees' response. Intrigued, Bresnahan began visiting book clubs, holding impromptu focus groups, and listening to the life stories of devout women told in the form of effusively annotated reading lists. Bresnahan discerned a pattern--that a woman's lifetime love of inspirational reading always began with the passionate literary appetites of a prepubescent Catholic girl. From that insight, Marcellina's Bookshelf was born, taking its name from Bresnahan's favorite female saint: the consecrated virgin sister of St. Ambrose. Needless to say, the female employees of B&B Books embraced this new project. (Bresnahan, for his part, had learned more about Catholic women than he really wanted to know, and he returned, refreshed, to his polemics and his putter.) Among the staffers most ardent about Marcellina's Bookshelf was a overweight typist in her early thirties named Nora Eunice Magliano.

A self-described "ceramist" who was "lost without her kiln," Nora Eunice Magliano had moved to Dubuque only a few years before, having previously lived in Madison, Milwaukee, Florence, and London. Her co-workers wanted to know more about her traveled past, but Nora Eunice would speak only of the present--she had come to Dubuque to care for her frail and aged grandmother, also named Nora. Nora Eunice Magliano referred to her tiny grandmother as "big Nora" and herself as "little Nora," and often talked to her co-workers about duty, sacrifice, and the lessons taught to her by her "favorite aunt"--the distinguished Sister Martin de Porres. A formidable woman indeed, Sister Martin was dean of art history at the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, an Italian graduate school "of the fine arts for women," where her niece had once taught, or studied, or visited, no one was quite sure.

It was Nora Eunice Gagliano who brought the manuscript of Warrior, Daughter, Saint to the B&B offices, where it instantly impressed everyone who read it, even Fr. Bresnahan, and it was quickly chosen as the first book to be placed with pride on Marcellina's Bookshelf. Throughout the pre-publication process all communication with Sister Martin was conducted through hand-written letters, which Nora Eunice received at the home of her grandmother, who was, of course, Sister Martin's mother.

Then, on the first day of February, 1974, "big Nora" died, at the age of 93. Her final weight in pounds matched her age in years.