The publisher of this site is a former headmaster and teacher at a start-up classical elementary and middle school. Inspired and gratified by the resources to help understand what classical education is, he started this site because he was frustrated by his inability as a school leader to find affordable books appropriate both to classical education and to students still developing their reading skills.

We are working to provide free and low cost resources to help teachers and schools to help their students.

Professor John Senior once remarked that “the Great Books movement of the last generation has not failed as much as fizzled . . . like good champagne in plastic bottles, they went flat.” Senior’s proposed remedy was to not merely to redouble our efforts to teach the great books, but rather to lay a sturdier foundation in early childhood. He believed that the ideas of the great books “thrive only in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes and adventures” found in the “thousand good books” of classic childrens’ literature.

We strive to protect those thousand good books, and so to saturate the imaginative ground of our children with healthy wonder and delight for generations to come. Thus, our mission is simply this:

To help make the world more beautiful and to make people happier by providing beautiful, low-cost, easy-to-read editions of classic childrens’ literature and classic illustrators.

With so many books appropriate to classical education, why start with fairy tales? In short, the kids. Reading a classic fairy tale with a young student is to unlock a whole new world for them. They eat the stories up and - as Vigen Guroian has explained so much more eloquently - reading these tales helps to form their moral imagination.

While we do not have any external marketing on this site, we do make a small royalty from any of our books you purchase from Amazon. But, there is absolutely no pressure to purchase anything. We do the work we do so that students have their lives enriched by fairy tales illustrated by Golden Age illustrators.

We are working very hard to make bulk purchase of our books through this site cost effective for all schools. At present, however, our calculations show that it is more cost-effective for schools buying less than 50 books to buy through Amazon and use Amazon Prime’s free delivery. If you are looking to purchase more than 50 books, please contact us for a price quote.