While Castalia House has repeatedly demonstrated excellence with regards to the content and manufacturing quality of our books, our customer service has been essentially nonexistent. What people may not understand is that this was not simply the result of indifference, but was more to the fact that we had absolutely no control over when a book was shipped out to a buyer.
One of the reasons I have been so reluctant to provide dates, and why I have been so unapologetic about missing those dates that we did provide, is because until now, there was never anything at all that we could do about them. For example, I was told by the bindery that THE JUNGLE BOOKS would be shipped to our newly-established shipping center on March first. However, we did not receive them until April 7th.
Fortunately, we are now in physical possession of our entire stock of leather books, and future books will be shipped from the bindery to the shipping center as soon as they are bound and boxed. We also will not consider any books “ready to ship” until we have received them and are ready to send them out. We have a new email address that anyone who has not received a book of any kind can contact (1), as well as an email address (2) for those who want to check on the status of their Library/Libraria/History subscription.
- (1) shipping-at-castaliahouse-dot-com
- (2) library-at-castaliahouse-dot-com
We have also recently discovered a bug in the WooCommerce system that has permitted a few people to order books that were officially out of stock, but still had books listed in the inventory. Apparently, it’s not enough to declare a book out of stock, but the inventory also has to be set to zero or the system overrides the out-of-stock status. So, for example, eleven customers have not yet received their leather Junior Classics set because we did not realize they’d been able to buy them since we’d declared the set to be out-of-stock more than a year ago.
Fortunately, we always keep a reserve to cover shipments that go awry, so we have enough books to send everyone. But in at least some cases, if you haven’t received a leather book yet, it may be because we didn’t know you’d bought it due to this WooCommerce bug. Now that we know about it, we will get the books sent out to the appropriate addresses.
And yes, we will permit new orders of the Junior Classics leather sets once books 7 through 10 are printed and being bound. We printed 500 copies of Vols 1 through 6, but only bound 250, so we can produce another 250 sets whenever we decide to pull the trigger.