"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." Psalm 119:105
Even during plowing and harvest
posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 :: 6:27 AM
I apologize for missing a post yesterday; as you can imagine, since the new edition of All Through the Ages came in on Friday, we have been working since Sunday morning to get all the preorders packaged and shipped. If you are waiting for a shipping confirmation e-mail, they are coming; we have had all hands on deck as it were to get the books out, so we will be sending the e-mails as soon as the last package has left the premises!
I admit I was tempted for a split second to work on the packaging Saturday too, but I soon discarded that idea. The Lord said, "You shall work six days, but on the seventh day you shall rest; even during plowing time and harvest you shall rest," (Exo. 34.21). A situation like this is as close as I am ever going to get to the equivalent of plowing time and harvest.
Whoo hoo! I just got a call from the trucking company which has had the new edition of All Through the Ages enroute from the printer's, and the books are being delivered TODAY!! That means we will be able to ship out everyone's preorders on Monday, July 14!!! I am so thrilled to have the books finally back in stock!!!
All Through the Ages is being shipped to us from our printer's this week. Because of the 4th holiday, I am estimating we will have the new 3rd edition back in stock by July 14, just to be on the safe side, when we will be shipping books to all those who preordered the newest edition. I have also updated the website with the latest info. The newest edition is harmonized and expanded in every area, but the Geographical section has been doubled, or tripled or quadrupled in some cases. With over 7000 books indexed by historical era, geographical region, genre, and reading level, including the latest books just out in this year's spring catalogs, it is proving to be the invaluable one-stop living books history resource!
2) Of course, all the new books recommended from all the various homeschooling catalogs we indexed up to and including this spring's latest catalogs have been included; along side their old recommendations (even though they might not be available new and in their catalogs anymore because of that, they were still excellent books, and many of them can be found in libraries or online).
3) Many smaller and independent publishers are republishing the the best of the great old books indexed by The Best Historical Novels and Tales and History of Nations recommended reading lists (sources for books indexed in All Through the Ages); a search for them on Amazon.com will bring them up available for purchase again. These have been retained in the 3rd edition of All Through the Ages. However, some of those titles were just too obscure, and unavailable to us in our day. Those titles have been removed, greatly streamlining several of the lists.
4) Corrections were made throughout all the lists where errors were found for incorrect reading levels, authors, titles, etc. and checked against several library databases as well as Amazon.com.
5) Book descriptions were greatly expanded in every list, in every level; and changed, where necessary, to make the descriptions even more accurate and helpful.
6) While every list in the Chronological section was expanded, the Geographical section was massively expanded; many of the country lists are quite complete now across all reading levels and for all book types (history, biography, historical fiction, literature, etc.). The Geographical section of the book is now nearly as extensive as the Chronological section, and should be a great help in Geography studies.
7) A few new articles and sidebars were added to aid understanding of more complex, confusing, or controversial events in history.
8) And finally, the book has been completely retypecast in a darker and easier to read (I think) font, at a larger size. More space was added between entries to increase legibility. The page design has been redone, all with an eye to increase legibility and ease of use. Yes, these changes added pages to the book, but we were committed to greatly increase the ease of use, relevancy, and legibility of All Through the Ages, even if it meant an increase in cost for us, without passing those increases on to the homeschooling community. Times are tough right now, and we have been there, trying to come up with hundreds of dollars for books while living on one income; we think homeschooling families deserve more help in tough times, not less. So not raising our prices is our little bitty way of helping out. :)
Finally, every last technical issue with the new edition of All Through the Ages has been resolved! We have a new printer much closer to home - due to the increase in paper and freight charges with our old printer - and we were trying to avoid raising the prices on our books. Even though the price on practically everything else has gone up, we wanted to continue to be a blessing to the homeschooling community and keep our prices the same.
Anyway, the complete overhaul of All Through the Ages in a new program and a new format for the new printer brought its own set of challenges, and maybe if I was more of a techie person it wouldn't have taken me so long. But, every obstacle has been surmounted, every hurdle overcome; the book is at the printer being printed, and we will be shipping in two weeks!!! Whoo hoo!!
Now if I can just figure out why my desktop computer won't connect to the Internet so I can update the Nothing New Press website ... I think I might have to back everything up, wipe the hard drive, and start from scratch. So I will be updating the website as soon as possible ... stay tuned ...
And now back to our regularly scheduled blogging ...
We are sooooo close to having All Through the Ages ready to ship! I hope to have a more exact date by the end of next week! Speaking of which, I have been sending the .pdf file of the relevant portion of All Through the Ages to those who have pre-ordered the book and are anxiously waiting for the print edition to do lesson planning. I in no way mean to crimp anyone's lesson planning for next year, so if you have pre-ordered All Through the Ages, and need to see the new American Revolution section, or Ancient Greece and Rome, or whatever it may be, please e-mail me and I will send send you the .pdf file of those sections while we are waiting for the printers!
We updated the Nothing New Press website with the newest information concerning the 3rd edition of All Through the Ages. The old edition of All Through the Ages has been out of print since the end of October, and I have been working all winter on the new edition. It is a complete revision: new layout, new books, updated and corrected timelines - everything. I am excited about this new edition, because it is so much more easily readable; there are even some new articles included in the booklists. We do not have the book back from the printer's yet, we had to modify our 3rd edition book file and that is almost done. We hope it will be very soon, and I will let you know as soon as we have a guaranteed date!
Nothing New Press will be open for just a short time tomorrow morning to ship books, then we will be closed until after the Thanksgiving holiday. Then we will be open for a few more weeks, and then closed again from December 17 through January 4, 2008. I realize that is a long closure, but this year my sweet dh and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, and he is taking me to Florida for an anniversary vacation and a visit to his family, who all live out there. (We rarely take vacations, so this is such a treat for me.) And since all our employees are family members, and they are also going out to Florida to spend the holidays with the family, no one will be here. So, Nothing New Press will be closed. If anyone needs books for the beginning of the spring semester, be sure to order them now (while the sale is still on), so that we can ship them to you before we close at the end of business on Friday, December 14. Our next shipping day after December 14 will be Monday, January 7, 2008. Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving!
All Through the Ages is out of print until February 2008
posted Sunday, October 28, 2007 :: 9:56 AM
As of October 26, 2007, we have sold out of the revised 2nd edition of All Through the Ages. We are working on posting the exact same edition in an eBook if you need the book before it comes back in print in February. We are working out the technical details now; keep watching this space for more details!
Tomorrow, Friday, is the Feast of Trumpets sabbath, and Nothing New Press will be closed. The sabbath begins this evening at the sighting of the new moon. We shipped all orders we have received up until this morning this morning already, and any orders that come in over the Feast of Trumpets sabbath or the weekend will be shipped on Monday. Have a blessed holiday!
There are two more Feast of Tabernacles sabbaths that occur during the week, coming up, on which Nothing New Press will be closed. The first day of Tabernacles is a sabbath, and it falls on September 28th this year, since the new moon was not seen last night. Then the eighth day of Tabernacles is also a sabbath, and it falls on October 5th this year. Nothing New Press will also be closed on those days. Those days are both Fridays, and we will do just as today: every order that comes in up to Thursday morning will be shipped Thursday morning, and then every order that comes in over the feast day sabbaths and the weekends will be shipped on the next Monday.
It has been a long time since I missed a Monday post; I'm sorry. This is our busiest week of the year with shipping for Nothing New Press (thank you for making it our busiest week of the year!) and it may turn out that I might miss a few more posts this week. But I am thinking of you all and have posts in my head and heart, and I will post again as soon as possible. In the mean time, I will give you advance notice that we have completely redone the Nothing New Press website, although it is not posted yet; we are still finishing up the last details. But I am so very excited about it, it will be soon, and hope you all will enjoy it when it is finished.
This year marks Nothing New Press' 10th year, and in honor of our anniversary, we finally started advertising, LOL. We have a small ad in the summer issue of The Old Schoolhouse magazine which should be in mailboxes and stores soon.
Now, in honor of our first ever advertising, we have put all of our books on sale! Right now! I am not sure how long the sale will last (until we run out of books?) but if you still need to get books for school, take advantage of our anniversary advertising back to school sale!
I just realized this morning that our e-mail box at Nothing New Press has been refusing mail since last Friday sometime, June 29th. And of course, since we just had a weekend, we didn't notice that there was a problem until today. The tech guys have gotten it all sorted out, Nothing New Press is still here and the e-mail is now working. So if you tried to send us an e-mail this weekend and it was refused, try sending it again, there should be no problems now. (Everyone who ordered books, we do have a record of your order, never fear, and you will receive shipping confirmations by e-mail from us this afternoon.) I am sorry for the glitch, and thank you for bearing with us.
When we got the first printing of Story of the Ancient World back from the printer's in January, we shipped out all the preorders and then sold out of the first printing by the end of February, much to our surprise. I think that was the fastest we ever sold out of a printing of any Guerber history. So we went right to work having more books printed; many of you have been waiting patiently for your copy, and the new shipment of Story of the Ancient World just arrived today! All of you who have been waiting for your book, you should be getting your shipment confirmations starting tomorrow, and probably through Monday.
With the arrival of the latest printing of Ancient World, we are fully stocked for the summer curriculum season. Thanks to everyone who has sent comments and questions, especially about Ancient World! We have started a FAQ page to post the answers and documentation for all the questions that we have received so far, so if you have wondered about something in Ancient World, don't hesitate to ask! Currently I am working on three more answers having to do with Egyptian history, and hope to have those posted this weekend or early next week.
At Nothing New Press, we answer every e-mail we receive from our customers. We do occasionally receive a complaint from a customer, who has not received an reply in their inbox, that we are ignoring their e-mail. But that is simply not the case; we always write replies, but not every reply is delivered. Sometimes we have our reply e-mails returned to us for delivery failure, but the e-mails are always replied to. If you are waiting on a reply from Nothing New Press, there are a few things you can check:
Do you have a spam filter? Check your spam folder for our reply. Since we are a business, and the information in our e-mails are about products, some spam filters automatically block our e-mails.
Set your spam filter to always accept e-mails from the nothingnewpress.com domain. We do not send out newsletters or even new product announcements to our customers (we probably should do that). You won't get junk mail from us. The problem is, I am not a web technician or Internet specialist. I don't know how to tell my e-mail program to send out mass letters, so we don't do that. We write to you if you have written to us first, or if you provided your e-mail address with a book order for us to e-mail you the tracking number when it ships.
Make sure your e-mail address that you provide for us is current, and it is one you check regularly. This might seem silly, but this has been the problem with miscommunication in a few instances before. Someone might be surfing from a friend's house or have followed a link in an e-mail account they don't check often to the Nothing New Press site. There is no way for us to know what your primary e-mail address is. We reply to the e-mail address we are given, and that is the only information we have.
Include your phone number with your e-mail or your order. That way we can still reach you and answer your question if your e-mails are being returned to us for some reason.
Our server has been down before in the past. A couple of times it was when malicious indivduals "hacked" our website or server to prevent the operation of business. Sometimes it doesn't even have anything to do with us; it can be a system problem at our server headquarters in the Pacific Northwest (although now we have redundant servers in other places - Texas is one I think - to prevent interruption in case of a power failure or something in one place).
In two instances we have had other servers mass refuse any e-mail from our server. This was because another company - not Nothing New Press - was using space purchased at the same server where we have our space to send out spam to everyone. This is called e-mail abuse, and your server will block every e-mail from our server, even if our server hosts 200 companies (one of which is Nothing New Press) and only 1 of them is responsible for the spam. As soon as the server people become aware of the problem, they cut off server service to the offending company, and have to ping all the other servers that is okay to start accepting e-mail from that server again. This process usually takes 24 hours from the time the abuse is discovered, but we have had several days, to weeks, of getting confusing e-mails from people (Why aren't you answering me?) before we have figured out the problem. The first time this happened, our e-mails were blocked for weeks, I think it was in December. I don't even know when it started, because we don't always get notified when an e-mail of ours is dumped instead of delivered. After a few weeks of us getting "Why aren't you answering me" e-mails from people, and not understanding the problem, because the reply e-mails were sitting right in our sent folder, our server people finally figured out what was going on. Now we have a policy that at the first sign of a returned e-mail notice, we notify our server people immediately, so they can begin an investigation on their end and stop the blocked e-mails before too much time has gone by. But the solution here, too, is to include your phone number with your e-mail, so that we can call if all else fails. We have not ever sold customer information to anyone, nor will we ever.
Since a few days before Christmas, we have had two blizzards and one smaller snowstorm, the biggest avalanche in recent Colorado history, which closed a major interstate, and 100-mile winds this morning, which blew the plowed snow back onto the highways in drifts, closing them again. The post office, UPS, airports, and highways have suffered more closures in two weeks than I can remember in my adult life here in Colorado. All this on top of the normal Christmas slowdown in delivery, due to higher than normal package volumes.
All this means that there has been a shipping snarl of packages coming into and out of Colorado, including our shipments of Ancient World. On top of this, my right hand assistant moved last week to a new house, and she is off this week to unpack. So we are continuing to ship, and I am doing the best I can to stay on top of e-mails, but I am behind, I will admit. I will keep sending e-mail notifications of shipments as best I can, but it is possible you might get your package before your e-mail. Or not. I don't know how much more snow and contrary weather we are going to get. :) But it is certain that packages are behind in delivery. UPS is averaging 7 to 8 days on their guaranteed 5 day delivery, and the USPS is way behind.
Last week I finished uploading the table of contents for The Story of the Ancient World, and today I was able to get the bibliography of sources uploaded as well. I will keep working on uploading Ancient World files as time permits. If there is anything in particular that anyone would like to see, please let me know.
Visit with Christine Miller awhile and let's share our thoughts on homeschooling, education, and life.
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"The Story of the Romans provides an introductory context for the culture and ideas so foundational to the development of Western thought.”
Anne Weiland :: The Old Schoolhouse Magazine
:: read a chapter from this book
:: more books
"For new and veteran homeschool families alike, this extensive new release from the editors of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine serves as a homeschool convention in a book. It details today's most viable education models, helping parents formulate an educational game plan and choose teaching methodologies. There are more than twenty contributors." Including Christine Miller, who wrote a chapter on Classical Education.
christine's reading
I am researching the holy days which were instituted by God as a celebration of the Messiah, instead of celebrating the holy days which were instituted by man to honor nature in place of nature's God.
:: Israel's Feast - Wooten
:: Annals - Ussher
