The Junior Classics campaign is going extremely well, having hit 300 percent of goal in less than 24 hours. You can acquire a digital set, a hardcover set, or a deluxe leatherbound set by backing the campaign.
The 2020 edition is about 85 percent 1918 and 15 percent 1958. This is because the 1918 volumes are generally better, but a) one of the original volumes was half-comprised of Alice in Wonderland whereas the later volume had a better and broader selection of stories, and b) the stories contained in the 1918 Volume 9 Stories of Today are seriously outdated and mediocre in comparison with the relatively timeless stories contained in the 1958 Volume 9, Sport and Adventure.
If you want multiple sets, just run through the buying process as many times as you require. You will receive multiple backer numbers.
The digital editions are both EPUB and MOBI (Kindle) format.
The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education of every child.
This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference to individual tastes and needs, will help many children enjoy good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child’s enjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual’s enjoyment of his mental occupations.
CHARLES ELIOT PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 1918
This is an essential action to help preserve the hard-worn knowledge of Western civilization. To back the campaign to revive the Junior Classics by REDACTED PRESS, please visit the crowdfunding campaign page.
All print editions will ship to the USA, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The shipping cost is included. The digital editions – EPUB and MOBI formats – are included with all of the print edition sets.
We’ve been looking into the possibility of making sets of leather-bound Junior Classics available, which raised the obvious question: are there any Castalia House books that people would like to be able to buy in a leather-bound edition? They wouldn’t be cheap, so we probably wouldn’t make more than four or five books available this way.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
UPDATE: Please note that I amonly interested in hearing what books those individuals who have already expressed interest in deluxe leather-bound editions would be most interested in having produced. That’s why we’re looking into the various possibilities in the first place.
If that doesn’t describe you, that’s fine, but then this conversation doesn’t involve you.
In September 2016, University of Chicago history professor Rachel Fulton Brown forged an unlikely bond with free speech activist and firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos. Since then, Fulton Brown has celebrated the friendship in dozens of intellectually bracing essays. These Milo Chronicles explain the twists and turns of Yiannopoulos’s volatile professional life and recall ghastly encounters with social justice warriors that almost destroyed her career. In this collection, the pair emerge as united by their Catholic faith and a mutual resolve to subdue the vindictive progressive scolds who despise and defame them.
Overflowing with tenderness and righteous fury, Fulton Brown’s meticulous defenses of Yiannopoulos as a cultural icon—and devoted friend—are part handbook for prospective culture war combatants, and part moving testament to the intense spiritual and defensive alliance between one courageous academic and her incorrigible champion and campus fire-starter.
Milo Chronicles: Devotions 2016 – 2019 is 608 pages and is available for $34.99 in hardcover from Amazon and from Castalia Direct.
Nothing causes more headaches, backaches, and heartaches for gardeners than weeds: these many-petaled, many-seeded, and many-rooted fiends. Stealing sunlight, water, and nutrients, they may leave our gardens looking grim and growing poorly. The chemical army is losing. Resistant weeds are spreading. Soil health is suffering. Drift and overspray destroys thousands of adjoining farms, homesteads, and properties each growing season. It is a broken system with bitter results.
WINNING THE WAR ON WEEDS teaches you how to defeat every gardener’s worst enemy! Available at a discount for only $16.99 from Castalia Direct.
You might think we’re crazy to publish all these gardening books, but trust me, from the business perspective, they’re some of the most successful books we publish.
An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity is now available in audiobook+. If you’re potentially interested in this very funny and very Canadian satire, you can listen to a nearly two-hour free sample at Unauthorized.
When the devil moves in next door to Cooper Smith Cooper’s house, Cooper doesn’t know what to make of him at first. But when the unexpectedly neighborly Mr. Scratch helps the unemployed actuary find a job at a local insurance company with the help of some inside information into the activities of Death, Cooper decides the old devil might not be so bad after all.The only problem, Cooper thinks, is how to conceal from his fellow actuaries his newfound ability to perfectly predict the time and place of people’s deaths. And then, there is also the small matter of the screams of his recently deceased neighbor coming from Scratch’s basement furnace to consider.
The audiobook+ of An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexityis now available at Arkhaven Comics. Narrated brilliantly in true Canadian fashion by Ken Dickason, the audiobook+ is 14 hours 17 minutes long and includes the ebook in both EPUB and Kindle formats. The paperback is also available at Castalia Direct.
From Chapter Five: The Loves of Thisbe
Thisbe pulled the car into traffic. “Songs about lovin’ and livin’ and good-hearted women…” sang the countrified radio.
“Songs about chintzes and blintzes and sprained arms in splintses,” sang Julius. He turned the radio off and sang with a Nashville accent: “Get your tongue out of my mouth baby, I am kissing you goodbye.” He spoke: “You can’t improve on that one, really.” He went back to the radio song: “Songs about sneezes and cheeses and snot when it freezes…”
“Julius,” said Thisbe, mock-annoyed, shifting gears and passing a car on the right with a stomp on the accelerator.
“I’m just one rhyme short for you: ‘Songs about frisbees and Thisbes.’ I suppose I could add ‘how-did-you-miss-me-s’ or something like that.”
“‘Bar Mitzvies’?” Thisbe suggested.
“No one was ever elected Pope by offending the Jewish vote. To judge by the number of Holocaust movies, the world is now seventy-five percent Jewish.”
“Julius…” said in a warning.
“I know, I know. Even the nephew of the king must be careful.”
“You aren’t the nephew of the king.”
“True. I got my job on merit. I blackmailed a politician.” Julius was in a government ministry, a job which he claimed combined the best of banking (“hours: ten to three”), teaching (“we do nothing between June and September”) and prostitution (“that little thrill you get when the hand drops into your pants is actually us, reaching for your wallet”).
“Mm hmm.”
“Blackmail is just as much a job skill as dating the boss’s daughter or having large breasts. You get what you put in. That’s my motto.”
But Thisbe changed the subject. “It’s too bad you weren’t there for the service.”
“I can’t go to Scratch’s service. I’m an atheist.”
“Julius, it would be nice if I didn’t have to go alone to these things.”
“You weren’t alone. I came along after the service. Remember, I come from a family of atheists. In fact, a family of Catholic atheists. The kind who believe you have to be punished for your sins even if there is no God. My folks should actually be Unitarians, the church specifically designed for atheists with children. But I’ve progressed. I maintain an independent posture toward the World to Come. To the extent that I dabble, I believe that Allah is God and Mohammed is his prophet. In the meantime, I like German beer, country music, and the Montreal Expos, or, as we call them in English, the Washington Naturals. Women dig me.”
She understood that all this was male bravado, perhaps not particularly well done. “Why Mohammed?” she said, following his irrelevancy despite herself.
“Well, first of all, Mohammedans become cross when you disagree with them. You say to a Moslem, ‘I beg to differ,’ and the next thing you know a pleasant young woman in a burkha comes to the door and detonates a nail bomb hidden in her purse. The suicide bomber is Islam’s one truly original contribution to world culture this last four hundred years.”
“Uh huh.” Thisbe was tired of this.
“But more importantly,” said Julius, sensing he was unappreciated, “A refinement on Pascal’s wager. Pascal says that since you know you’re going to die, there are really two possibilities: you die and it doesn’t matter what you did; or you die and it does. He says you should believe in God because you don’t lose much by wasting an hour a week being Christian, and if God does exist, you could gain Eternity. It’s always worth betting on a long shot if the upside is pretty snappy—eternal life, for instance. Like a lottery ticket that costs less than you’d notice spending and could win you a million spondulix. I mean, why not invest a few hours?”
“So why won’t you come to church with me then?”
“As I said: a refinement. I took Pascal one better. He’s right. You should do at least the minimum if you might get eternal life. But what kind of eternal life? That was my question. Christian eternal life is endless contemplation of the Godhead. So that’s pretty good. Better than a visit to the proctologist, for instance, although some of my gay friends might disagree. But at least better than waking up and finding yourself the cheeseburger course in an eternal Satanic McDonald’s, which is what my ancestors believed.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“In what, proctologists? Of course I believe in them. I’ve got the stretch marks to prove it. But that’s not what we were talking about.”
“Jesus, Julius.”
“Yes, him I don’t believe in. Nor that eternal contemplation stuff. Why believe in eternal contemplation of anything? Islam takes Christianity one better. Instead of contemplating God, when an Islamic man gets to heaven, he gets–”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Babes! By the truckload. Gallons of them. Talk about your world’s great religions. It’s sort of like Calvin’s doctrine of Total Depravity. But—a very optimistic kind of Total Depravity.”
“It’s chauvinistic. Do the women get truckloads of men?”
“If you’re betting on an afterlife, go big or stay home is my advice.”
Milo Yiannopoulos is not straight, but that’s never stopped him from handing out excellent advice. And let’s face it, heterosexuals need it. Milo has spent his entire life advocating for the most brutally repressed minority on the planet—straight people. In this book, the Grand Marshal of the Boston Straight Pride Parade explains what straight people are getting wrong in 21st-century America and how to keep your pecker up in a world that seems increasingly hostile to heteros. One day, says Milo—if the injunctions in this book are followed—straight people will be able to openly express pride in themselves without fear of judgement or hate, just like everyone else.
In today’s America, few are brave enough to be openly heterosexual. For the rest of us, there’s HOW TO BE STRAIGHT.
Milo Yiannopoulos is an award-winning journalist, a New York Times-bestselling author, an international political celebrity, a free speech martyr, a comedian, an accomplished entrepreneur, a hair icon, a penitent and, to the annoyance of his many enemies, an exceedingly happy person. He is the most censored, most lied-about man in the world, banned from stepping foot on entire continents for his unapologetic commitment to free expression.
HOW TO BE STRAIGHT is available for $2.99 at Amazon and in EPUB/Kindle formats at Arkhaven. A paperback edition will be available soon. And while you’re at it, be sure you haven’t missed Milo’s other books:
Oh, Susan. The most maligned and misinterpreted of Pevensies. And, incidentally, my favorite character. Let’s talk a moment about these misinterpretations, particularly the ones that have absorbed themselves into the popular consciousness despite how many times I yell about them on Twitter.
In a Time Magazine interview, J.K. Rowling described her debt to C.S. Lewis.
“I found myself thinking about the wardrobe route to Narnia when Harry is told he has to hurl himself at the barrier in King’s Cross Station—it dissolves and he’s on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and there’s the train to Hogwarts.”
However, she points out that there were aspects of the Narnian chronicles that bothered her. She also points out that Susan Pevensie
“…is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a real problem with that.”
On that note, Philip Pullman penned an angry Guardian article where he claimed that for Lewis, a girl’s achieving sexual maturity was
“so dreadful and so redolent of sin that he had to send her to Hell.”
It’s so unsurprising that Pullman proves to be as hapless a reader as he is a writer.
As part of our mission to save the remnants of Western Civilization, we are seriously considering having Castalia publish print editions of certain public domain books. The idea is to crowdfund each project, thus making sure we don’t waste any time, effort, and expense on books that no one wants.
Unless, of course, I just really want to do that particular series….
Anyhow, the first candidate is the Collier Junior Classics, as it’s something I consider a must for every homeschooling family. We’d probably also look very hard at a Great Books series, as well as some of the more important military history works.
Let me know if this concept is of genuine interest to you, and what books would be of sufficient interest to you to back the crowdfunding of them.
Or will it? For reasons that I am not currently able to disclose, I consider it to be highly unlikely that Neon Revolt is going to be able to complete his preorder campaign for Revolution Q on Indiegogo:
The INDIEGOGO Pre-Order campaign for Revolution Q is NOW LIVE!
We’re bypassing Amazon! We’re bypassing traditional publishers. We’re bypassing everyone and bringing this campaign straight to the people!
The campaign will run for a total of 23 days, and this will be the only way to get your hands on a copy for quite some time!
So head over to Indiegogo to join the pre-order, now!
Just to be clear, I’m not blackpilling or being negative here. I absolutely support what Neon is doing and encourage everyone who is interested to back his campaign, but I also happen to be extremely well-informed concerning Indiegogo’s official position on Q. So, get in touch if they suspend your campaign, Neon. We’ll be happy to help you get the book out if they shut down your preferred path to publishing.
