About.

St. John’s, and the door it opened

I studied at St. John’s College. The curriculum there is not about the great books; it is the great books. Freshman year opens with Homer, in seminar, at a long table, with no lecture and no textbook standing between you and the text. You read Plato, argue with Plato, and are expected to have an opinion about him by Tuesday. The rule is simple: go to the original, read it closely, and take it seriously enough to disagree with it.

Most people never get that education. Not for lack of a good mind. The door is locked behind a language they don’t read: Homer’s Greek, Dostoevsky’s Russian, Baudelaire’s French. A translation gets you the plot. It rarely gets you the line, or the word the poet chose, or the syntax the philosopher built his argument on.

I believe AI can open that door. Not by summarizing the great books, or explaining them away, but by doing the slow, exact work a good reader once did alone with a grammar and a lexicon: aligning every line to a translation worth trusting, parsing the word that stops you, reading a sentence aloud until your ear catches it. The book stays the hero. The help just moves faster than a semester and a shelf of dictionaries.

That belief is the mission of 1732 Studios: read the great books as they were written, with a St. John’s education’s worth of help a glance away.

What we make

We make guided editions of the great books: the original text beside a clear translation, aligned line by line, read aloud, with the grammar and context of every line a tap away. Where no worthy public-domain translation exists, we make our own. From the editions grow audiobooks we record, and our own translations, published as books in their own right. The full particulars, including what we charge and how a reader’s voice stays private, are on the press page.

Jon Ragsdale, founder. Email: [email protected].