A Bittersweet Moment

Since 1999 when the Baldwin Project opened its doors, it has offered hundreds of children's books to thousands of readers just like you. In 2012 we launched Gateway to the Classics, which offers even more books, along with an innovative set of tools for grouping content. The time has come to combine them at gatewaytotheclassics.com. And, yes, it is a bittersweet moment!

Why Now?

In March the local hosting service that we have used for mainlesson.com since 1999 was acquired by a larger company. In July that company informed us that they would be migrating mainlesson.com to a new platform, which meant that we would have to upgrade the software applications we had developed to operate mainlesson.com. Rather than do that, we decided to take the opportunity to merge the resources available at mainlesson.com with those available at Gateway to the Classics.

What You Will Find at Gateway to the Classics

Many books available at mainlesson.com have been available for a fee in the Gateway to the Classics membership site. The rest of the mainlesson books have now been transferred to Gateway to the Classics. But now there is no fee to read anything at Gateway to the Classics that you could read for free at mainlesson.com, even where the formatting was improved or higher quality illustrations were included. So the upshot is that everything you read at mainlesson for free, you can now read at Gateway to the Classics for free, while enjoying the enhanced formatting and illustrations.

New Content Types at Gateway to the Classics

Besides books and stories, you can enjoy, at no cost, a sizable collection of poems by over 300 poets, arranged by author, title, and first line.

A limited number of books and poems have audio associated with them. And songs from Walter Crane's The Baby's Bouquet and The Baby's Opera are available for listening.

How?

The links in the sidebar on the left take you to the corresponding pages at gatewaytotheclassics.com. Any link you have to a book or story in a format such as this:

http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=baldwin&book=fifty&story=cakes

should redirect you automatically to the corresponding page at gatewaytotheclassics.com. You can test this functionality by clicking on the above link. If you have lots of hard-coded links in another format, let us know. We may be able to redirect those automatically as well.

A Culture of Reading

Visit our new blog A Culture of Reading and sign up to receive updates. This post, This Way to Christmas with Ruth Sawyer, gives a glimpse of how we will help you discover titles available at Gateway to the Classics, and incorporate them into your reading.

Join Us at Gateway to the Classics

We look forward to welcoming you to Gateway to the Classics and unveiling new types of content for you there in the near future.