Chapter House: “A Cultural Necessity”
Our first official review from The Washington Examiner’s Bethany Mandel.
We woke up Monday to a full review of Chapter House in the The Washington Examiner.
Bethany Mandel, a homeschooling mother of six, and a writer we have long respected, wrote on the question of: What has happened to the shared stories that once bound one generation to the next? And she answered it, in part, by pointing to what we are trying to build with Chapter House.
We will not summarize the whole piece here. It deserves to be read in full. But there are a few excerpts we found ourselves returning to and we felt them worthy of pointing out.
On the physical object itself, and why it matters:
“The first thing you notice about the collections is that they actually look like books. So much of modern children’s publishing is now designed around disposability; too many books are softcovers with thin bindings that seem all but designed to split after a few readings. By contrast, the Chapter House volumes are a throwback to how publishers once printed their wares: bound in sturdy hardcovers and housed in handsome box sets. These are books intended to be read by multiple siblings, revisited at different ages, and handed down.”
On what a book actually asks of a child:
“A book requires patience, sustained attention, and a willingness to follow an argument or narrative for hundreds of pages before arriving at a conclusion. Those are not merely academic skills. They are habits of mind that shape how your brain works.”
And on the bet at the heart of this whole project:
“The Centers are making a wager that children still hunger for great stories, that parents still want something more substantial than another screen or silly graphic novels.”
That wager, we should say, is one we are glad to make openly. We did not start Chapter House because we identified a clever market gap. We started it because these are the books we wanted to read to our children. We just could not find them in quality editions.
Mandel closes her essay with a line we hope will outlast the moment:
“Every civilization is, in some sense, the sum of the stories it tells about itself. Chapter House is betting that those stories are still worth passing on. That seems not only like a worthwhile publishing project, but increasingly like a cultural necessity.”
If you are reading this, you are already part of the wager. We do not yet know how the next phase of Chapter House will unfold, but we are glad not to be going it alone.
You can read Bethany Mandel’s full review at the Washington Examiner. It sits behind their paywall, but if you subscribe, it is worth your time.