The Charlotte Mason Series…

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.