It's all part of what Clancy is calling The Millennia Collection: Glorious Christmas Music, Songs and Carols, a nine-volume, 170-song extravaganza that includes songbooks and CDs. Next into production: Children's Christmas Classics.

The project, financed largely with credit cards, already has the former executive recruiter more than $400,000 in debt. "I used to have two credit cards," Clancy said. "Now I have 18."

Clancy's love of the music was sparked when he was a small boy living in St. John's Orphanage Asylum in West Philadelphia. "I remember being 6 years old and going to midnight Mass," recalled Clancy, 57, who has fond memories of the Catholic orphanages he was raised in from infancy. "There was the smell of the Christmas tree, a huge manger scene, and the nuns singing. To hear the carols played, it was magical. That was the seed."

As an adult, he started collecting Christmas music in forms that included 16th-century Italian Christmas concertos, Irving Berlin and Barbra Streisand. "I've got them all listed in a ring binder, so I don't buy the same record twice," he said.

Then, in the late 1980s, he began making gift cassettes for friends filled with songs culled from that collection of 200-plus recordings. He also put together booklets with information about the music.

"People would say, 'This is great - why don't you do something with it?'" recalled Clancy, whose office in his house in the Villas, near Cape May, isn't much bigger than the desk and filing cabinets it contains.

Neither a writer nor a historian - he has an undergraduate degree in journalism from George Washington University - he spent a decade doggedly researching and writing his books. "I can't tell you how many hundreds of hours I spent in libraries and museums selecting the artwork," he said.

But he couldn't attract any publishing interest. "They didn't want to deal with all the copyrights," Clancy said.

Clancy never wanted to be a publisher. But a publisher he became, giving up executive recruiting to devote himself full time to the project. He chucked the City Avenue apartment he had been commuting to during the week, and set up shop as Christmas Classics Ltd. in the house he shares with his wife, Renate, a teacher in Wildwood.

Among his biggest challenges was getting the rights to the songs he planned to feature in American Christmas Classics. (The music in Best-Loved Christmas Carols was already in the public domain.)

As he had with his carol collection, he'd hoped to include a songbook with the American volume, which gives the history of such gems as "Silver Bells," and "I'll Be Home for Christmas," and discusses the contributions black slaves made to Christmas music. But that was not to be. "The copyright owners didn't want me competing with their songbooks," Clancy said.

It also took a bit of sleuthing to uncover who owned some of the songs, among them "Cowboy Carol," sung in the play The Cowboy Christmas, first performed at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia in 1944.

An example of the fascinating tidbits Clancy uncovered: Representatives of striking Philadelphia Navy Yard workers attended the opening-night performance with members of Navy Yard management. It's said that the goodwill created by the show helped settle the strike.

There was some 11th-hour publishing drama when American Christmas Classics was held up by recording company MCA's refusal to let him use Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," one of the best-selling records of all time, on his CD.

"People said, 'You're never going to get it,' " Clancy said. But he'd chosen it as one of his featured 47 classics, and it had to go in. "I wrote to the CEO of MCA and explained the project," he said. "I said, 'This is a history book.' "

He got the rights.

Clancy is a busy man these days as he struggles single-handedly to get his product into stores and catalogs. A number of museum stores, including the National Gallery of Art, have picked up the book-and-CD sets, impressed by their coffee table-book quality.

In an appearance on QVC, he sold 450 copies of American Christmas Classics, which includes three CDs, in six minutes. "If I'm on the radio for 20 minutes, that's much better," Clancy said. "For some reason I do really well in the Midwest."

He's already busy choosing the images for his fourth volume, Sacred Christmas Music.

"My objective is very simple," Clancy said. "If by next year, I've sold all the books and I'm out of debt, and I have one dollar, it will be a good year."

Eils Lotozo's e-mail address is elotozo@phillynews.com.