The publishers of Living Book Press dived into the home schooling scene in the mid-2010s (we became aware of them in 2017) and they've definitely made a splash with home schooling families that enjoy living books!
Anthony Coafield, who owns Living Book Press, is a home school dad, who, when first starting to educate his sons, was really drawn to the Charlotte Mason method. The idea of using great books to convey the big ideas and lessons of life resonated with their family. The main problem was that many of the books were so hard to find. Many that were still protected by copyright were out-of-print and getting very expensive second-hand, and because they live in Australia, many public domain titles readily available in the US were very expensive to import there.
Ambleside was his main curriculum of choice, and Anthony knew that without the wonderful people who had put that curricula together he couldn’t have started schooling his boys. He wanted to try and make homeschooling using the Charlotte Mason method easier for other families to follow, so decided to pursue publishing these hard-to-find titles. Making books available to families that wouldn’t have otherwise been able to use them makes all the hard work tracking down rights, transcribing, formatting and proofing worthwhile. According to him:
Our mission is to pay forward the help we’ve had from those who came before by making great quality reprints of living books affordable for everyone in a variety of formats.
Living Book Press offers three formats for their books: softcover, hardcover, or PDF. Because he has them printed on demand, you can order the books, and he can have them printed and mailed to you from your country (although, this obviously doesn't apply everywhere). This keeps the overhead costs lower, and allows him to focus on adding new titles rather than managing inventory and shipping packages.
Overall, we're really pleased with LBP. They publish about 300 books (as of April 2024) and many of them are titles that truly have been difficult to obtain for many years. Some, like the colorized Comstock Handbook of Nature Study volumes (with Notebooks), the Halliburton Marvels of the Orient and Occident, and Fleischer's Secrets of the Universe books, are unique to LBP; he has also published an affordable set of Charlotte Mason's volumes about education. But in other areas, he is taking on competition.
His main competitor in the education market is Yesterday's Classics, which has a similar mission and a nearly identical audience. In fact, many of their titles overlap. It would make sense sometimes to only carry one version of these titles (who are we kidding, we have to offer ALL the versions!) but every time we ask customers to say their preferences, the results are always mixed!
So why is this? We think it would be good to offer a comparison of editions, but you should know that even from book to book, reasons for choosing one publisher over another varies tremendously!
Let's dive in, shall we?
Selection: Yesterday's Classics has been around longer and are drawing from a larger batch of books already prepared for online reading. At current count (April 2024), they have 562 total titles, of which 373 are available as printed books. As near as we can tell, LBP has around 300 titles total, though they add new titles very quickly!
Attractiveness/readability: The YC volumes are generally bigger and usually have larger font and wider margins; their covers are glossy, printed in solid colors and use old-fashioned art; they typically use a cream-color paper. LBP tends to be more trim, though generally still very readable. Their covers tend to have a matte feel and, while certain series deviate from this, many of them have a consistent black & white spine design with beautiful color illustrations. The paper in most of their books is cream-colored and of similar weight to YC, but their color illustration books have white, thinner paper. Their website makes it clear which books are which.
Illustrations: Yesterday's Classics tends to use older illustrations, whereas Living Books is often more diverse. When the books feature the same art, YC tends to offer smaller, crisper images, while LBP has larger images that can feel more pixellated. Sometimes the LBP books will feature pictures from multiple artists (making it hard to credit the illustrator); some of the books feature color photographs rather than b/w art. YC rarely prints in color and the original art can sometimes be much less clear in b/w.
Durability: We've never seen a problem with either of these falling apart; however, we have heard from others that YC occasionally has issues with the bindings not holding the pages well for long. We don't think YC offers hardcover options; we haven't seen many of the LBP hardcovers, only carrying a few of them ourselves.
Price: Yesterday's Classics is almost always slightly more expensive. However, when LBP is the higher priced option, it usually includes color pictures.
| Yesterday's Classics on Left |
Living Book Press on Right |
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