With Suetonius and Tacitus taking the last two places, the Blacksmith & Witches Classics line now stands at thirty-six annotated volumes, every one of them available as both an ebook and a paperback. None of the thirty-six is a bare reprint: each carries new editorial work — an introduction, notes, and, where the edition calls for it, illustrations or a new translation — built around a public-domain text chosen under the house rule that author and translator both died before 1972. It is, in the end, one shelf built by one person: emperors and philosophers, storytellers and historians, filed together.
Suetonius wrote about the Caesars from an unusual seat: he had worked inside the imperial household, handling the emperor's own correspondence, and his Lives read like a personnel file kept by someone who had seen the palace from within. The new annotated edition of The Twelve Caesars uses John C. Rolfe's Loeb translation, with the house's own introduction and notes. One thing is stated plainly rather than patched over: the opening of the Life of Julius Caesar is lost in transmission, and the edition says so — it does not invent what the centuries dropped.
Tacitus set out to write the history of the Roman empire under the successors of Augustus, and what survives of the Annals is Books I–VI and XI–XVI — a great history with its middle and end torn out by time. The new annotated edition prints the surviving books as they have come down to us, names the lost books openly, and adds nothing of its own to fill the gaps. Read this way, the book is two stories at once: the empire Tacitus described, and the fragile road — copyists, libraries, chance — by which any ancient text reaches a reader at all.
Premiere week for the Paul and Marry short drama runs from today through Thursday, November 19 — one short scene a day, five in all. The run opens with episode 2, “Sacred,” and closes on Thursday with episode 6, “Together.” Each scene is built from dialogue taken from the book's own text, with Paul and Marry as the lead pair: a novel, cut into daily scenes short enough to watch with morning coffee and, the house hopes, sharp enough to send a reader back to the page.
Kepler Drift is the house's own deep-trance journey video: two minutes of slow cosmic flight, made to feel like drifting outward rather than launching. Nothing in it is stock sound — the music was synthesized from scratch for this piece, layer by layer, until the track itself carried the motion. It sits on the Stage beside a guest card, PLANNETTIC's “Centauri,” two different answers to the same question: how small can a trip to the stars be, and still feel like one?
Titans and Dragons of Zenmly, Book Two of the Teraura Saga, has passed 109,000 words in its current manuscript. The newest chapters — 56 through 59 — are written, and the ending is taking the shape the author has described for it: a road-to-Kepler story, in which Paul and Marry leave a Teraura under invasion for the resistance headquarters on Kepler. Paul's autism remains the saga's core turn: the aliens cannot invade his mind, and cannot use his body as a host. Book Two is still being finished; this desk will report its publication date when there is one to report.
Before anything is bought, it can be read. The house Reading Room carries the opening of the saga free — Paul of Teraura, chapters 1–9 — alongside a growing shelf of philosophy chapters from the Classics line, among them the complete Enchiridion of Epictetus. There is no account to make and nothing to install: the pages are ordinary web pages, made to be read in a browser and shared by link. It is the house's standing answer to the hardest question a new reader asks an unknown author — why should I start? Start free, and see.
Two house paperbacks are now live on Amazon through KDP. Paul of Teraura, Book One of the Teraura Saga, is listed at $12.99, and Chekhov's Selected Stories (Annotated) — ten stories in Constance Garnett's translations, with the house's introduction and notes — at $11.99. Print is the newest shelf for a house that began in ebooks, and it is not finished: a rotation of Classics paperbacks is still to come through the same channel, volume by volume.
BW Stage is the house's own vertical-video stage: a TikTok-shaped feed that Blacksmith & Witches runs itself, on its own site, with new viral batches posted daily. It began as a home for the house's films and music, and its door is open — other creators can list their work in the house marketplace and stand on the same stage. The reasoning is the house's usual one: platforms lend an audience and can take it away; a stage of your own is slower to fill, and it is still yours in the morning.
A note for the diary, filed in advance. On Thursday, November 19, episode 6, “Together,” closes the Paul and Marry premiere week on B&W Stream. Across the same days, Patreon carries Batch 5 of the patron scenes — the longer, patron-only side of the same production line. Premiere week was designed as one arc across two shelves: a free scene a day in the open, and the deeper cuts behind the membership door.