I’ve been like a kid at Christmas, waiting for the postman each day to bring me my presents, in this case, my samples of the hardcover Charlotte Mason books! And when they arrived I was not disappointed. Cloth covered with gold stamped title and author on the spine, they are beautiful and understated, you can see them above. The only thing I’ll change is that the author will say ‘Charlotte M. Mason’ on the blue copy rather than just ‘Charlotte Mason’. I think it looks better that way. They’ll be available as a full set with free shipping anywhere in Australia, Europe and the USA/Canada and will be released early July 2017. Pricing in the USA/Canada is US$119.95 shipped, and in Australia $179.95 shipped. Here’s a link to the blue set, and the gray. Order now to get yours asap!

Full sets of the softcovers are also available for US$70 shipped in the USA/Canada and $109.95 in Australia. Any Aussies who bought the first few books and want the rest please contact me so I can give you an extra discount to make it as if you ordered them all at once.

The website has also been customised to hopefully show local pricing depending on where you’re shopping from (and to hide the Books of Marvels from US customers. I don’t like refunding money and telling people I can’t send books to them!). Pricing is cheaper than Amazon, and shipping in the US/Canada is free when you spend over $30!

As soon as Vol 6 is uploaded I’ll start contacting those of you with ‘typo’ copies also!

If you have any questions please let us know, and please share this with anyone who may like to get some of the books.

The Original Home Education Series. Photo Credit Jeanne Grant Webb.

It has been brought to my attention that some people online have a few questions about the Home Education Series I released recently. I thought I’d answer them all here. Please feel free to share this blog post.

1. Are my editions authorised?
Charlotte Mason died in 1923, which means that all her work has been in the public domain for decades. Once a work enters the public domain it is free for anyone to release, edit, build upon or use in any way they like, therefore there is no edition able to be authorised. If someone adds annotations or footnotes then that part is covered by a new copyright, and authorisation is necessary. In this instance, though the original text written by Charlotte Mason is still public domain. An example would be editions of these books using Ambleside Online’s annotations. The parts written by Ambleside Online are covered by copyright and anyone wanting to use these parts would need authorisation from Ambleside Online.

2. Are my editions copies of the ‘pink’ books?
To make the ‘pink’ books the original series (pictured above) were photographed, cleaned and reprinted.  Because of this, their layout is the exact layout of the original Charlotte Mason books. Both of us have reproduced the original formatting of the public domain Charlotte Mason text. This was requested by a number of people for easy referencing when reading Charlotte Mason’s other articles.

3. Are your editions also photo’s of the original text?
No. Every book published by Living Book Press is a complete transcription of the original so that it can be presented in a fresh, clean font for easier reading. While this takes significantly longer I am really proud of all my books and want them to be as pleasurable to read as possible.

Here is a comparison between the original CM text, and my edition, (please click for larger versions)-

   

Please feel free to share this post if anyone is asking questions, and if there is something else you’d like to know please ask away.

Thank you so much for all the kind words and support I have received, I really appreciate it.
Follow us on Facebook for more news, and to be informed when the hardcover series is released. I’ll also be offering the full set with free shipping cheaper than Amazon to anyone in the US who would like it as soon as the rest of the series is done.

 

I love the CM community. The wisdom and encouragement I get from you all is what makes me confident in home-schooling my boys. There is no way I can repay all the help I get, so one of my main purposes in republishing these books was that it was my way to ‘pay it forward’. I’ve been itching with excitement at every post asking if they were available or complaining about how expensive they were second hand.

But, unfortunately, I made a small mistake. Copies from this website were fine but there was a problem on Amazon. I was alerted to the fact that a draft of the cover was showing on Amazon which contained a typo. I must have done something wrong when uploading the corrected version. I had uploaded the correct covers when I had the sickening feeling that the interior may not have updated either. It’s nothing major, a few apostrophes facing the wrong way, and a couple of commas that should be periods etc. Things that flicking through you wouldn’t notice, but things that would take me out of the reading experience. It’s not the quality I would want for myself, so it’s not what I want to release.

Any future orders won’t have a problem, and they’ll be available again over the next couple of days after I go over the proofs once more with a fine tooth comb, just to be double sure! I want people to know that when they purchase one of my books, it will be great.

If you have purchased one of the Amazon ‘typo’ copies in the short time they were available please contact me so that we can work something out. Once the other books are finished (a couple of weeks from now) there will be a full set available on our website which will be cheaper than Amazon. If you let me know how many you bought from Amazon I’ll send you a coupon code which will give you a discount for the books you’ve already purchased and I’ll send you a new complete set.

Thanks for your understanding!

Ever since I found Charlotte Mason I knew it was the home-schooling style for me. For our family it’s the perfect blend of structure and freedom, teaching us to think and exposing us to a wide range of ideas, while still leaving time to follow our passions. But everything I knew about Charlotte Mason was second hand. I wanted to read it for myself. I’ll confess I made my own ebooks taking the text from Ambleside Online (for my own personal use only) but I hate reading on a screen and never got very far. I’d heard various groups were reprinting them, but as the years rolled by and nothing was released I got frustrated and decided to do it myself. I’m proud to release the first three books in the series, with the rest to come in the following weeks.

There’s a been a lot of questions about my reprints, so I thought I’d try and answer some here.

Do the books have the same page numbers as the original series?

Absolutely. If you’re doing a serious CM study you want the same page numbers. I replicated everything down to the hyphenated words broken over two lines. (I confess footnotes have more words per line occasionally, but that doesn’t change anything.

What size are the books?

I spent a long time working out what size to make the books. After pulling many books down from my library and handing them to different people for opinions I settled on 5″x8″. It’s slightly larger than the pink books. I thought about when I would be likely to read the books (I make them all for me anyway), and for me the two main times I can feed myself by reading something like this are: when the kids are at sport and I have that peaceful few minutes, and at the end of the day when I can finally take a deep breath and think.

With that in mind I decided the books needed to be-
1/ Portable.
2/ Light.
3/ Easy to read.
4/ Margin space.

Some of the books get up near 500pages. I found anything above 5×8 got too large to fit easily in with all the other essentials that going out with kids seems to require. At that page count it’s already tapping 500g (1.1lb), so any larger and the books get quite heavy. Even adding an inch each way and you’re up to 670g (1.5lb), which is starting to get not only too bulky, but too heavy when I’m curled up in my favourite chair, or lying in bed reading. To me, 5×8 feels perfect, even cozy, if I can use that word to describe a book.  The font size is slightly larger than the originals, but only very slightly, and there is a nice margin space around the outside to make notes in. It’s a bigger margin than I have in my Bible!

Here’s a sample.

Will there be hardcovers?

Yes, absolutely! They’ll be the same size, available in either blue or silver cloth covering, no dust jacket. They’ll just be very simple with the title and author written on the spine. I should have some to show off in the next week.

Will you ship to me?

Absolutely, but if you’re in the USA it’ll be cheaper for you to use Amazon for the paperbacks. I have flat rate shipping to different countries. If your country isn’t listed let me know and I’ll add it.

If you have any other questions please contact me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.