Repairing The Ruins: Report
How The Week Went
Hello friends of Study The Great Books!
We (my daughter Zoe and myself) made it there and back again, like good little hobbits! We drove from our eastern Phoenix suburb some 15 hours to set up our booth among 1,300+ attendees and made a good showing for STGB. All of our stock of Shakespeare’s Macbeth books and study guides, as well as our new Commonplace Books and the rest of the accouterments for the booth (signs, stands, table cloths, beta PDF guides, and an extra table), fit neatly into the back of our Kia Sorento with room to spare.
We are indeed a small operation compared to some of the other vendors like Canon Press, Veritas Press, Circe Institute, and Roman Roads Press, but every year we show up we have had a little more to offer. This is the third year we have been attending Repairing the Ruins as a vendor. This year we entered the fray more seriously than ever before with the very first of our print products! I get excited when I think about how far we have come in the last three years and about the exponential growth that will occur between now and next summer in Atlanta for RTR 2026!
Zoe and I had a blast on our road trip! We took a picture by some cool rocks! If you think these are boring…that’s a you problem.
I managed to restrain myself from following years of Mario Kart training.
We stayed at a 10 Commandment toting hotel in Odessa, Texas (Let’s go Texas)!
We got the booth all set up and looking professional.
We connected with some of the Beza Institute crew as well as some other friends. Starting left and going clockwise:
(Beza Fellow), (Beza Boss), (Beza Fellow), myself, (new Head of School at Veritas Academy in Savannah), and (who just published an awesome new book you need to buy).
I got to deliver a talk on using the Scholastic Method in the classroom.
We even squeezed in a movie before heading back.
Our time there was a great success! I am happy to report that between sales at the conference and online during the same week we have sold out our initial stock of The Commonplace Book! But no worries, a fresh shipment arrives in our warehouse (by which I mean my house) on Thursday, so order away!
It was really encouraging to be able to show off the first of our professionally designed and printed materials. The format of our new Annotation Editions of Macbeth were well received, many got to know our unique approach to studying Great Books by thumbing through our Study Guides as I walked them through the process of study, and The Commonplace Book was bought by almost everyone who actually picked it up and learned about it! Incredibly encouraging to know that our approach comes as a breath of fresh air to so many.
Lots of people told me something like, “We have tried to introduce the practice of Commonplace journaling, but it hasn’t gone well. Students and teachers don’t know how to make it take off.” Time and time again I heard, “This is it! This is exactly the thing we were missing to make this practice viable!” The response was overwhelmingly positive and I couldn’t be more blessed by the encouragement I received and I am hopeful that it will become a great tool for many people for many years to come!
You can get your Commonplace Book, Macbeth Annotation Edition, and Study Guide at our new site, www.studythegreatbooks.com, right now!
Enough about us…I want to tell you about some of the other really amazing vendors at RTR.
Vendor Highlight
The Medieval Mapmaker was back again! This is one of our strategic partners whom we have struck a deal with. Many of the maps made by this great little company will be finding their way into the STGB study guides including this newly drawn and released map for Bram Stoker’s Dracula! Check out their Etsy store and pick up one of their hundreds and hundreds of maps (historical and moder geography, as well as imaginative maps).
The Rafiki Foundation is another wonderful vendor at RTR and they are doing incredible work in relieving widows and orphans in their distress. Among the many things they are doing, they are planting classical Christian schools in Africa! I always buy one of their items, made by women in Africa working to support their families, for my youngest daughter as a souvenir. She loves them! Here is what I got her this year:
Another vendor I really enjoyed getting to know this year was
who runs Classical Art at Home for homeschooling families and Classical Art at School for brick and mortar institutions. I was very impressed by his skill as an artist, his background and training, his love for Christ and his kids, and he was super excited to have found The Association of Classical and Chritian Schools and meet so many great people this year. His love for art and for Christ were equally evident and his training in Italy in classical methods of art speak for themselves. You have got to check him out!Eighth Day Books is my favorite bookstore in the whole world and they come every year and set up a great shop for attendees of the RTR conference. They curate some of the best books in the world for their customers. I have never found a single garbage book in their store! How often can you say that about a bookstore nowadays?
There were many other great vendors and you can see a complete list at the main Repairing the Ruins website. Plenty more are worth your time to check out, so why not take a look? The many talks given at the conference, by many great speakers, will also be available there soon and that is something you won’t want to miss! You should seriously consider planning to come join us next year in Atlanta. It’s an amazing conference full of amazing Christ exalting teachers, administrators, thinkers, makers, and doers. You will love it!
Yours in Christ,
Jacob Allee