GALLERY: The Castalia Library
A curated collection of the world's most beautiful books
There are four book subscriptions available from Castalia Library:
Castalia Library: the original subscription
Libraria Castalia: elite editions featuring Italian goatskin and 22k gold stampings.
Castalia History: editions focused on historical works.
Castalia Cathedra: editions from Christian literature, philosophy, and theology.
A fifth subscription will be launched in 2026.
Castalia Library also produces a number of non-subscription editions, including works by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Chuck Dixon, Vox Day, The Junior Classics, and a nine-volume History of Japan published by the Cambridge University Press.
CASTALIA LIBRARY
The Castalia Library is a subscription-based collection of the world’s most beautiful books, all of which are bound in leather. Each book is chosen for its literary appeal to Castalia House’s core community of book collectors, which provides an eclectic variety that clearly distinguishes it from other fine books publishers that tend to concentrate primarily on bestsellers and classics.
Launched in 2019, there are now more than thirty books in the Castalia Library collection, more than half of which are sold out. The list of all the Castalia Library books and their status.
The Library books were initially published in top grain Italian cowhide, although a discovery of a reliable source of full grain pigskin leather in 2025 allowed Castalia House to upgrade the leather quality to the now-defunct Franklin Library standard beginning with the books bound in 2026.
Castalia Library books are bound in two locations, a US bindery in Tennessee and the Castalia Bindery in Switzerland. All of these images are photographs of genuine books from the actual print run, not mockups or special editions.
THE MISSIONARIES by Owen Stanley is the first book in the Castalia Library collection. A print run of 500, it sold out quickly. A popular work; second and third editions have since been produced. It is one of the funniest and most outrageous novels ever published. The author subsequently published a quasi-sequel, THE PROMETHEAN, which is also available in a leatherbound edition from Castalia Library.
THE MEDITATIONS by Marcus Aurelius. This proved to be surprisingly popular, so much so that it sold out before it had been produced. Although we haven’t published an official second edition yet, we did produce about 150 test editions in green leather that were made for the purposes of getting the Castalia Bindery in Switzerland operational, which were subsequently sold at a discount to interested subscribers.
Note that the test editions do not have spine hubs or gilded page edges, since those were not the production processes that required testing.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright
THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri is one of the true classics of literature and the Castalia Library edition, which features the Longfellow translation and artwork from a sixteenth-century Venetian edition, is one of the most attractive ones ever published.
LIVES Vol. I by Plutarch
LIVES Vol. II by Plutarch
SUMMA ELVETICA & OTHER STORIES by Vox Day
This is the first in what is presently a five-volume epic fantasy series entitled THE ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT. All five volumes have been published in leatherbound editions by Castalia Library.
At over 768k words, ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT is already longer than THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE HOBBIT combined, and there are still two more volumes to go! There is no better epic fantasy being written today.
HEIDI by Johanna Spyri contains both of the original Heidi novels.
RHETORIC by Aristotle has somewhat surprisingly proven to be one of the most popular books in the collection. It’s the first of four Aristotle works published by Castalia Library, followed by ETHICS, POLITICS, and METAPHYSICS.
DISCOURSES ON THE FIRST TEN BOOKS OF TITUS LIVIUS by Niccolo Machiavelli.
The ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT epic fantasy series continued with A THRONE OF BONES Vol. I and A THRONE OF BONES Vol. II by Vox Day. The series is generally characterized by reviewers as being better than A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE but not as good as THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
ETHICS by Aristotle.
THE JUNGLE BOOKS by Rudyard Kipling include the complete texts of both THE JUNGLE BOOK and THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK.
POLITICS by Aristotle
ANTIFRAGILE by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a part of the official Library subscription. However, we actually published four of his books, two of which were not included in the subscription.
THE BLACK SWAN by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a bestseller that is probably his most famous book. Although it was not part of the subscription, we produced a print run of nearly 1,000 books in order to meet the demand.
THE PROMETHEAN by Owen Stanley. A satire and quasi-sequel of sorts to THE MISSIONARIES.
SKIN IN THE GAME by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the third of the four Incerto books published, and the second that is part of the official Library subscription.
FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS is the fourth of the four Incerto books by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. All four books are also available in black goatskin leather Libraria Castalia editions.
THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON by Johann Wyss is a Swiss classic that has proven to be extremely popular with Library subscribers. One of the challenges in producing it was the fact that it has a number of unofficial endings that required some judicious decisions in the process of laying out the final text.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen represented the first time we utilized a scanned interior rather than producing an original layout. This was because we wanted to not only perfectly replicate the 1894 Peacock edition, illustrated by Hugh Thompson, but improve upon it. Justly famous for its beauty, the original layout was slightly cramped vertically, so we added more space between the text block, the page titles, and the page numbers to improve the reading experience.
The massive popularity of the book is why the print run for this edition was 25 percent higher than our largest previous print runs, although that didn’t prevent the book from selling out very quickly upon release.
WAR AND PEACE by Count Leo Tolstoy is a massive tome that has been published as a single volume of more than 1,000 pages by other deluxe publishers, but anything over around 850 pages jeopardizes the integrity of the book due to the weight of the gilded pages which cause the book block to be gradually separated from the cover over time by gravity.
So, as is our usual practice when dealing with a very long book, we divided the novel into two volumes that have proved to be one of our most popular designs with the way they combine symbolic and geometric elements.
The two volumes of A SEA OF SKULLS are the fourth and fifth books in the epic fantasy series by Vox Day.
If you are interested in collecting some of the world’s finest leatherbound editions, subscribe to Castalia Library.
The Junior Classics
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.
The 10-volume set of The Castalia Junior Classics: 2020 Edition is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other bookstores in hardcover and ebook editions, but was also made available to serious book collectors in a special leather set with a print run of 150 units that was sold out pre-production. The ten volumes are as follows:
Fairy Tales and Fables
Myths and Legends
Tales of Greece & Rome
Heroes of Chivalry
Stories That Never Grow Old
Stories About Boys and Girls
The Animal Book
Heroes of History
Sport & Adventure
The Poetry Book
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 1: Fairy Tales & Fables includes classic fairy tales from Europe, featuring old favorites like Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, and The Ugly Duckling. It also contains a number of Aesop’s fables, as well as tales from Scandinavia, India, and the American Indians.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 2: Myths & Legends includes epic tales from the Nordic lands, the Arabian Nights, and the great German and Finnish sagas.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 3: Tales of Greece & Rome includes the classic Greek myths, stories about heroes like Hercules, Jason, and Theseus, selections from The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, and tales of the founding of Rome.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 4: Heroes of Chivalry includes tales of King Arthur and his knights, of Charlemagne and Roland, of El Cid, and of history’s most famous knight errant, Don Quixote.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 5: Tales That Never Grow Old includes selections from Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and retellings of famous plays by William Shakespeare.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 6: Stories of Boys and Girls includes selections from Tom Sawyer, Heidi, Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, and The Story of a Bad Boy, as well as a number of classic short stories for children.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 7: The Animal Book includes fables, tales by Beatrix Potter, tales of Brer Rabbit, stories of Animal Sagacity, and the modern classic The Parliament of Beasts and Birds by science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright.
The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 8: Heroes of History is about the heroes of European history, from the self-sacrifice of the Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylae to the heroic and seemingly hopeless defense by the British Army at Rorke’s Drift.
The leather edition of The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 9: Sport & Adventure will ship to the original backers in the first quarter of 2026
The leather edition of The Junior Classics 2020 Edition Volume 10: The Poetry Book will ship to the original backers in the first quarter of 2026
CASTALIA HISTORY
The Castalia History is Castalia’s second subscription-based collection of the world’s most beautiful books, all of which are bound in leather. Each book is chosen for its appeal to Castalia House’s community of book collectors whose primary interest is in history.
Launched in 2023, there are now six books in the Castalia History collection, four of which are already sold out. The list of the Castalia History books and their statuses.
Castalia History was launched with THE LANDMARK THUCYDIDES: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strassler. This is the ultimate edition of the classic history by the great Greek historian, with footnotes, explanatory comments, and maps on every single page.
The 10-volume CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY published in 1911 and edited by J.B. Bury is one of the greatest histories every published. While Castalia Library hopes to publish the complete set some day, in the meantime, the two-volume set abridged by Cambridge historian C.W. Previté-Orton is an excellent summary of the period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. The first volume is The Christian Empire to the Twelfth Century.
The second volume is The Twelfth Century to the Renaissance.
STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS by Sir Charles Oman is a fascinating set of historical essays that proved to be a surprising hit with History subscribers and sold out its entire print run well before it was bound. The complete text was serialized here on the Castalia Library site in 116 parts and more than 650 readers finished reading the entire work.
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE: Volume I c. 500-1024, edited by Jonathan Shephard, was the first full print run to be bound at the Castalia Bindery in Switzerland. It is bound in a very fine Spanish cowhide leather of superlative quality, although unfortunately the exquisite leather is so supple that it did not hold the spine hubs very well, which is why this two-volume set is one of the few Library books that lacks them.
The second volume of THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE covers the years from 1025 to 1492.
HISTORY BOOKS IN PRODUCTION
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ENGLISH MILITARY BOOKS UP TO 1642 AND OF CONTEMPORARY FOREIGN WORKS
COMMENTARII DE BELLO GALLICO by Gaius Julius Caesar
HISTORY OF FLORENCE by Niccolo Machiavelli
THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES by Sir Charles Oman
CASTALIA CATHEDRA
The Castalia Cathedra is Castalia’s third subscription-based collection of the world’s most beautiful books, all of which are bound in leather. Each book is chosen for its appeal to Castalia House’s community of book collectors whose primary interest is in Christian literature, philosophy, and theology.
Launched in 2024, there are now two books in the Castalia Cathedra collection, two-thirds of which are sold out. The list of the Castalia Cathedra books.
CATHEDRA BOOKS IN PRODUCTION
THE ETERNAL MAN by G.K. Chesterton
PRAYER AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE by St. Thomas Aquinas
Is there a schedule for when the next books are being sent to subscribers? I just finished Sea of Skulls I and II (excellent!).