TAN Books was founded in 1967 as TAN Books and Publishers in Rockford, Illinois, by Thomas Aquinas Nelson (not to be confused with the founder of the Bible-publishing firm Thomas Nelson) to keep in print books teaching traditionalist Catholicism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.

[2] On September 29, 2016, Baronius Press, a British publisher of traditional Catholic books, filed a civil lawsuit against TAN Books and Saint Benedict Press.

[3] The lawsuit alleged that TAN had violated Baronius's ownership of the copyright for the English translation of Ludwig Ott's Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Grundriß der katholischen Dogmatik in the original German).

Baronius Press purchased the exclusive rights to the English translation from the original copyright holders in 2009, and obtained an exclusive license with the underlying owner of the German original in 2011.

The English translation of Fundamentals had been in the public domain in the United States since its initial publication in 1954, as U.S. copyright law did not provide automatic copyright protection to works initially published in foreign countries (the English translation of Fundamentals was originally published in Ireland).