Chapters I and II Now Shipping

Chapters III and IV will ship soon

The question we have heard over and over since Chapter House preorders began in May: “When will the book ship?”

We are pleased to announce that they are beginning to ship now. The Chapter I and Chapter II box sets are being sent to customers, along with the bundles and supplemental books. Chapter III and Chapter IV are due to ship soon, before the end of June. We are still waiting to receive them from the printer.

Truthfully, we only recently saw Chapters I and II for ourselves. The books were due to arrive in early May, but were lost in transit. Meanwhile, we had a booth reserved at The Texas Home School State Convention starting May 28, and as that date approached, we grew increasingly nervous.

Would the books be as beautiful as we had dreamed? Would there be unnoticed errors that we had missed? Physically printing books is stressful, because for as much time as you spend honing manuscripts and inspecting fine details on the screen, you have no idea how the final product will look until it is in your hands. And by then, it is what it is.

We did not see the books for ourselves until we arrived in Texas on May 27 to set up our booth. We opened that box with more than a small degree of trepidation.

Glory to God, the books turned out beautifully. Our team did a wonderful job.

The paper is beautifully bright, with some of the most crisp typesetting we have ever seen. The art is gorgeous, especially the custom end papers in each book. The covers truly feel great in your hand. You feel as though you are reading something important.

As children, we grew up with mainstays like the Harvard Classics, Junior Classics, and Reader’s Digest editions, which looked and felt important, and thus stoked our desire to read them, because we wanted to be important too.

Today, the children’s publishing industry has taken the opposite tack: Lowering the bar and condescending to children as much as possible to “meet them where they are.” The result has been new generations that are increasingly screen-addicted and illiterate.

We believe that the key is to give children stories and books that they grow into, that inspire them to want to read because the story is big and important.

The best part of our Texas adventure was talking to children, especially boys who expressed no interest in reading. That always prompted us to show them T. Shaw-Taylor’s art from Beowulf and tell them the story. The usual response was that their eyes lit up and they were eager for more. One boy loosened his death clutch on his iPad and reached for the book.

As much as the stories themselves should be important, the books should feel important. The media industry’s biggest mistake was reducing art to mere data. A book is more than just words on a page. A book is the type, the art, the binding, the feel of the cover, and even the smell.

A physical book, exquisitely made, has true, discernable value. Words that merely float in the ether have a value that is completely fungible. A real book, printed in ink, cannot be altered after the fact. It cannot be censored or made “politically correct.” It is of its time, for the ages.

For those of you who have books on the way, we hope you, your children, and your grandchildren love them. May they be passed down from generation to generation.