Getting Ready to Launch!

STGB May 2025 Update

Hello Friends of STGB!

We are about to enter a new and exciting phase in the life of our curriculum project! I am pleased to announce that Study The Great Books is officially an LLC and that we are just weeks away from launching our business in earnest and making the first round of our completed Study Guides available for individual purchase by digital download or physical print. Don’t worry, our new phase will not interrupt our Substack services. Our Substack will continue to provide you with the exact same benefits it always has, with Paid subscribers getting early and instant access to the “beta” and “pre-pub” versions of our study guides in PDF, as they become available, for just $5 a month or $50 a year (we also have multi-seat discounts available for administrators of schools who wish to assign seats to their teachers). We will also continue to offer the same basic versions of our guides online for free subscribers.

Soon, however, you will have the option to purchase the final and most polished form of our materials in whatever format best suits your needs (digital or print). Soon you will have the option to purchase individual study guides and curriculum as needed without a subscription. Subscribe or buy individually, your option. Our own new website is currently in development (I hope to be able to share more about this in the near future) and we are also pleased to announce that we will be partnering with Biblio Guides who will also be making our materials available for digital download in the near future.

At this moment we are working to get our first set of finished guides set up with the printer and we are planning to launch sales in June concurrent with our attendance at the Repairing the Ruins conference in Dallas, TX. From that point onward we expect for there to be a fairly regular increase of available materials from STGB month by month!

We have been so blessed to have made such good partnerships with people like

Joe Willey

(our official STGB artist) and Jesse Kennedy (The Medieval Mapmaker) whose content makes our guides both more useful and aesthetically pleasing. We are also incredibly blessed by, and indebted to, all of you who have read and shared our articles, used and shared our guides with other friends, families, educators, and school administrators. We extend our warm appreciation to those of you who have prayed for us and to those who have donated to STGB or become paid subscribers with the goal of financially supporting our long term mission. We are humbled by the fact that our curriculum, which is still in process of development and much of it in beta-mode, is already being used by families and teachers and individuals not only all over the U.S.A., but on every continent of the globe (save Antarctica, but our penguin outreach efforts will not return void I am sure). God has been very good to us!

Our commitment at STGB is to support Christian families, schools, teachers, students, and individuals who want to develop the life of the mind for the glory of Jesus Christ and the good of his kingdom! We will do anything within our power towards that end, including putting our digital material into the hands of any family or start-up school that cannot afford the material right now for free, just ask. Building up the body of Christ is of first importance to us and we will do anything we can to see a generation of godly and intelligent, kingdom-minded, Christians rise up and take the world for Christ! If you are able to support us financially, we thank you (my kids do too, they like to eat every day), but if you have a need to get or give a classical Christian education and are lacking in financial means at present then we are here for you!

What do the STGB Study Guides Offer?

If you are new to STGB, perhaps you are wondering what makes STGB Study Guides the way to go for your students, your children, or your own personal edification. Here is a general description of what you can expect to get out of every STGB Study Guide:

The Study The Great Books study guides all offer the same classically oriented and Christ exalting approach to engaging history and literature. Our guides offer students everything they need to help them read and understand primary source texts from the ancient, medieval, and modern world. Making use of the Trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and sacred Scripture students engage each text through answering questions meant to ensure they understand what they have read, can interpret what they have read, can discuss the ideas they have read, and can submit all the things they are learning to God’s word as their final authority.

1. Grammar Questions ask, “What does the text say?”

2. Logic Questions ask, “What does the text mean?”

3. Rhetoric Questions ask, “What are the main ideas in the text and what do we think about them?

4. Theological Questions ask, “What does God’s word say about these same or similar things and how, therefore, ought we to think about them?” 

Additionally, every STGB study guide provides students with the definitions of challenging and/or key terms found in the text, they provide descriptions of the people or characters mentioned in the text, they provide descriptions or give further information about places mentioned in the text, and they provide details about events in history which are mentioned in the text. Each of these categories is color coded to the STGB Annotation System so students can learn to mark their books well for better engagement and gain the advantage of more quickly finding the information they need upon review of a section of the book. With the use of erasable pens (recommended):

1. Black is the color for underlining points of interest and making notations in the margins.

2. Red is the color for underlining vocabulary words, key terms, and literary references.

3. Blue is the color for underlining people or characters.

4. Purple is the color for underlining places and information about geography or distances.

5. Green is the color for underlining historical events and dates of importance or noting the passage of time.

Finally, every STGB study guide gives hints to Great Ideas, Virtues, and Vices which can be found in each writing. Students are encouraged to find examples of these in each reading and note them in the margins of their books so that they might learn to see common themes in history and great literature, gather excellent examples of virtue to emulate, and make note of vices to avoid. These examples often provide students with memorable quotes and examples worthy of remembering and therefore become just the kind of content perfect for recording in a Commonplace Journal. These journals become excellent resources for inspiration for writing projects and provide useful material to aid students in the completion of many of their Composition and Rhetoric assignments.

[[[We are excited to announce that this summer STGB will be releasing a brand new kind of Commonplace Journal which will help students to get more than ever before out of this great practice of great minds! More on this coming soon!]]]

What do the STGB study guides look like?

As to the aesthetics, here is an example of the cover art from

Joe Willey

for Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor as well as one of the maps by Jesse Kennedy (The Medieval Mapmaker) which will be a part of the same guide.

Where can you go to learn more about what STGB is up to?

You can learn about our mission, goals, and commitments on our About page. You can also go to our Directory of Resources to learn more about Classical Christian Education and what makes it stand apart from secular education and even many other kinds of Christian education. From that same page you can gain access to the free online resources of limited great books study guides, instruction about logic, composition, and rhetoric and much more.

Which Study Guides Are Currently in Development?

We have lots if irons in the fire! Currently we are working on guides for:

1. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

2. Augustine’s Confessions

3. C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity

4. Dorothy Sayers’ Whose Body?

5. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles

6. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Primitive Rule of the Knights Templar

7. Herodotus’ Histories

…and more! Some of these will be done much sooner than others and new projects are getting started all the time (there is a method to the madness).

Thanks again for all your support! Don’t forget to enter our drawing this month to win a boxed set of Jane Austen’s novels!

Yours in Christ,

Jacob Allee