Charlotte Mason’s Home Education Series—Heirloom Editions Are Coming!

Step into a world of learning where the rustle of leaves is as important as the turning of a page, and curious minds are shaped by the beauty of nature and the power of compelling narratives.

This was the revolutionary vision of Charlotte Mason, an educational pioneer whose insights from over a century ago are finding fresh relevance today.

This summer, Smidgen Press is inviting readers to join us in ushering in a new era by reviving archival-quality, Smyth-sewn hardcover editions, beginning with Volumes 1 and 6 of Charlotte Mason’s Home Education Series.

Back story: discovering Charlotte Mason

I’m Jody Skinner, founder of Smidgen Press, where we aim to put lovely stories in beautiful book-shaped packages.

When I began Smidgen Press in 2020, searching for literature that resonated with readers, I discovered a vibrant community that cherished what they called “living books.” Listening to them talk about learning as being an adventure through storytelling, rather than enduring lectures or textbooks, ignited my curiosity about Charlotte Mason. Her ideas, rooted in seeing children as whole individuals and not merely information regurgitators, felt like fresh, revolutionary-common-sense thinking to me.

As part of establishing our core collection at Smidgen Press, I wanted to honor Miss Mason by reprinting something of hers. With 2023 being the hundredth year after Mason’s passing, a number of events were planned to celebrate her legacy, and our other book projects left perfect room for a Charlotte Mason nonfiction project.

So in early 2023, we released what we know today as Volume 6 of Charlotte Mason’s Home Education series: An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education. We crafted what we labeled our “Centenary Edition” in the same page size as the first edition, and we completely re-typeset the book with text that’s comfortable to read, while preserving the original page numbers as margin-notes for readers whose resources depend on those.

Now in 2025: We always intended to continue the full six-book series, once our reader base expanded enough to support it. After reader feedback that the 6×9 Philosophy felt too large, compared to “the pinks” (the US reprints released in the late 1980s), we recreated Philosophy of Education for the series in a more manageable 5.5×8.5 page size. Now our Philosophy of Education, Centenary Edition, will remain available, but as a standalone edition.

Since I’m a proofreader by profession, an assistant and I transcribed Volume 6 from scratch and proofread against scans of a 1925 1st edition copy (nerd alert! Deani lent me her personal 1st printing copy—see the airport handoff story in the Centenary blog post).

I was also excited to include bonus material from Mason’s edition notes, sections which had been cut before production. Here are the Volume 6 extras in our Centenary Edition:

• We added an appendix courtesy of Deani and the Charlotte Mason Institute titled “Some Impressions of the Ambleside Method.” This section offered reflections from headmasters and headmistresses across England on the evolving educational structure of Mason’s life work from her headquarters in Ambleside, England. Deani offers a foreword with reasoning for this inclusion.
• The other bonus material fleshes out a full “Part III” in Volume 6, grown from the “Supplementary” section it was originally cut to, and in this section Mason contrasts the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Milton. A second foreword from Art Middlekauff lays out where Mason’s notes indicated this section should be included, and this chapter was transcribed by volunteers at Charlotte Mason Poetry.

It was a delight to produce our Philosophy of Education Centenary Edition in the complete form that Mason envisioned. Due to space considerations, both with page count and with transitioning to a slightly smaller page size going forward, our upcoming Volume 6 that will coordinate with the Kickstarter series will not include the “Some Impressions” Appendix the Centenary Edition has, but we will keep the full “Part III.” 

Continuing Charlotte Mason’s Home Education series

Since publishing Philosophy of Education, the most common questions we have gotten have been (1) “where’s the rest of the series?” and (2) “can we please have nicer bindings?”

Enter Kickstarter—the opportunity to say YES to both questions.

Our release plan: 2 + 2 + 2 = 6

As already mentioned, we’re doing just two volumes for this first Kickstarter campaign. Since my team and I proofread, design, and typeset everything in a fairly complex juggling act to keep the original page numbers, these are not small projects.

We’re getting test/proof copies soon but the plan is for our Kickstarter to have three main options:

• Smyth-sewn hardcovers with dust jackets
• Perfect bound paperbacks and print-on-demand hardcovers (these are both glued bindings)
• Ebook editions

Future plans for both sewn and less expensive bindings

Our ultimate aim is to complete all six volumes of Charlotte Mason’s Home Education series. Smyth sewn bindings will be available through Kickstarter first, with future campaigns also having previous books available. (For example, if/when we have a campaign for Volumes 2 & 3, Volumes 1 & 6 will be available again as individual add-ons, and so on with other campaigns.)

We also plan future group orders for the sewn bindings, outside of Kickstarter.

I don’t anticipate that we will carry individual stock of the sewn bindings, outside of Kickstarter and group orders, since we are an active duty military family and we’re not equipped to warehouse or ship.

During the times when there’s not a Kickstarter or a group order happening, we plan for these to be available as glue-bound, print-on-demand (POD) hardcovers and paperbacks through our store and at online retailers.

The series books will come out Kickstarter-first, and once all orders are delivered, the POD bindings will be made widely available.

Our printing company for the archival bindings is based in the USA, with small minimum order quantities. This way, items will print and ship in a month or less from when we finalize an order.

Why Kickstarter? (And how does it work, exactly?)

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform that functions much like a preorder system while providing security for backers if the project does not meet its funding goal. We chose Kickstarter as a way to get an accurate count of how many books we should order, and this is a company with a good reputation for product launches like these.

Here’s how a Kickstarter works:

• When a Kickstarter campaign goes “live,” it will list the items being offered along with their price tiers.
• “Backers,” or buyers, can select a product tier and item quantity. Money is not collected immediately, and backers can change or cancel their “pledge” before the campaign is completed.
• If the pledges surpass the funding goal for the project, backers are charged on the last day.
• If the goal is NOT met, no one is charged.

For the rest of the series: How well this first campaign “funds” above the baseline also factors into our prepping and publishing speed for any future campaigns. Will we be able to move forward with two volumes in 2026 and two in 2027? Or are readers eager enough for these to finish the full series with two campaigns in 2026?

As a worst-case scenario, if these first two editions of Charlotte Mason’s Home Education series do not fund through Kickstarter, then we may move forward with eventual group orders of these first two sewn editions, but the rest of the series is less likely to be a priority. (We hope that won’t be the case!)

Follow us for more, and we’re so glad you’re here!

To stay caught up on our news, there are a few places we’ll be announcing updates.

• Visit SmidgenPress.com/Kickstarter, create account or log in, and click the black “Notify Me On Launch” button. We will not launch until we have over 100 followers there.
• We’ll keep our newsletter followers up to date on the situation! Sign up at SmidgenPress.com/newsletter so you’re on our inner circle.
• Follow us on Facebook or Instagram, even though social visibility is odd right now. If you aren’t seeing any of our posts, unfollow us and follow again. This should (might?) prod the algorithm to show you our things first.

We’re so grateful for those of you who are digging our posts out of the dregs of the algorithm and helping raise awareness! It’s a fight this year for visibility, so we treasure all our connections. We appreciate you sharing and giving us feedback on how we can be clear on what’s happening with this launch plan.

My team and I love the book side of things! These business pieces are a far greater challenge for our young company.

Thanks for being here, and I look forward to connecting more with you.

~Jody Skinner 🙂