Having completed The Divine Comedy and The Lives of the Greeks and Romans, Vol. I for Castalia Library, the production team are currently laying out the interiors of Books One, Two, and Three of the 2020 Junior Classics. This is a painstaking process, since it involves the insertion of literally hundreds of images. We’re not simply scanning the old books and putting them out there as is, which is why the process has taken so long. The objective is to ship the first three volumes in ebook and regular hardcover in time for Christmas, then ship the remaining seven in two sets as they are completed. The leather editions, however, will not be shipped until all ten are complete, then they will be bound and shipped together as a single set.
The first step was the editorial decisions concerning what stories stayed in, and what their replacements were. The second step was the collection of over a thousand public domain images, and the third step is the physical layout of the text with the images. We’ve decided to add captions to the full-page images, but not to the partial-page images, which is a minor departure from the haphazard approach of the 1958 edition, which didn’t have a rhyme or reason to the images it captioned or did not caption. The fourth and final step will be the production of the cover, which has to wait until the interior is completed in order to get the size right, and then we can send the volume to the printers.
This process has taken longer than expected thanks to Corona-chan, so we appreciate the great patience that has been shown by the campaign backers. And in answer to an oft-heard question, yes, every volume will be available to non-backers via the usual Castalia channels once they are printed and shipped to the backers, with the exception of the leather editions which will be made periodically available in limited edition sets.