A studio for reading the great books as they were written.
1732 Studios opens today with a simple aim: put the great books back in a reader’s hands, in the language they were written, with an education’s worth of help built into the page.
The studio was founded by Jon Ragsdale, a graduate of St. John’s College, where the curriculum is not about the great books but is the great books: Homer in the first seminar, argued over at a long table, in the original. Most readers never get that education. The language is the wall: Homer’s Greek, Dostoevsky’s Russian, Baudelaire’s French. A translation gets you the plot. It rarely gets you the line.
1732 Studios is built on a wager: that AI can do the slow, exact work a reader once did alone with a grammar and a lexicon: aligning a text to a translation worth trusting, parsing the word that stops you, reading a line aloud until the ear catches it. Then it gets out of the way. The book stays the hero. The help just arrives faster than a semester and a shelf of dictionaries.
“I got that education at St. John’s, and it changed how I read for good,” said Jon Ragsdale, founder of 1732 Studios. “Most people never get the chance. I think AI can hand it to them: the real text, in its own language, with enough help on the page that they can actually read it.”
The particulars
- Guided editions of the great books: the original text beside a clear translation, aligned line by line, read aloud
- Public domain texts, complete and unabridged, never anthologies or excerpts
- Where no worthy public-domain translation exists, the studio makes its own
- First editions arrive this summer, for iPhone and iPad
1732 Studios makes guided editions of the great books, audiobooks, and its own translations, published as books in their own right. The first editions arrive this summer.