Breeze through the Classics, cover to cover, in half the time.

The text is never altered and never simplified. Every hard word, old sense, and name is explained in place, on the page, before you reach it.

Subscribe — USD 6.99 a month Read a free opening

Every book’s opening is free. USD 6.99 a month opens the whole library. Cancel at any time.

The problem

Why the Classics are hard to finish?

60pages in, twice

You’ve started Moby-Dick. Twice.

Somewhere there is a bookmark still sitting sixty pages into a book everyone says is great. Not because it was too hard. Because every third sentence sent you to a dictionary, and then to your phone, and then the evening was gone and the book was still on page sixty.

400pages in, at the third party

You gave up on War and Peace at the third party.

Natásha turned out to also be Natálya Ilyínichna, and also Countess Rostóva. Half the dialogue slipped into French. Four hundred pages in, you could no longer tell who was in the room, which meant you could no longer tell who was lying to whom, which meant you were reading words and following nothing.

The language is genuinely hard: dense, old, full of words and names that need looking up. But the hardness is not what ends the book. The continuous stopping is. Every lookup is a small exit from the story. Take enough exits and the evening is gone, the thread is lost, and there is no story left to return to. The classics ask for fluent reading, and fluency is the one thing constant interruption makes impossible.

The solution

Open any page and the help is already on it.

A Christmas Carol · Stave I: Marley's Ghost

MARLEY (the man's surname) was dead: to begin with (this is the first thing to establish). There is no doubt whatever (no doubt at all) about (concerning) that. The register (official written record) of his burial (putting a dead body in the ground) was signed by the clergyman (church minister), the clerk (church official who keeps records), the undertaker (person who arranges funerals), and the chief mourner (person who leads those attending a funeral). Scrooge (a man's surname) signed it: and Scrooge's (the son of Scrooge's brother or sister) name was good upon (trusted at) 'Change (the London meeting place for business people), for anything he chose to put his hand to (sign). Old Marley (Scrooge's former business partner) was as dead as a door-nail (completely dead).

MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

What’s on the page

Five kinds of help, placed before your eye arrives.

Nothing to tap, nothing to look up, nothing to set up.

What’s happening

A short panel before each chapter: who, where, and what to expect. Orientation, never spoilers.

Who’s here

The chapter’s cast in one glance, each person identified in a line, with no more than the story has told.

Inline glosses

Small blue explanations (like this one) right after the hard words. Every rare word, old sense, and name, where it stands.

What it says

Beside the hardest paragraphs, a note restates the sentence and shows how to read it.

Names you can say

Where a name is hard to pronounce, in the cast or in a book’s title, a ► speaks it aloud in its own language, with a pronunciation guide.

The library

Choose your book.

Every title is annotated chapter by chapter and reviewed before it reaches you.

All of these, and every book to come, for USD 6.99 a month.

Subscribe — USD 6.99 a month Explore the library

The arithmetic

Where the evening actually goes.

Take War and Peace, 455,073 words in the original English. It holds 11,634 words and names a modern reader has to look up. Here is what that costs, and what it costs here.

Reading it on your own, dictionary beside you

102.5 hr

Reading, plus 11,634 stops at 20 seconds each. Only 37% of it is reading.

Reading it here, explanations already on the page

44.4 hr

The same 455,073 words, unchanged. The lookups were done in advance.

102.5 hours becomes 44.4. The text untouched, the dictionary work done. You just read.

Figures for War and Peace from this edition’s own count. Reading speed 200 words a minute; a dictionary lookup taken at 20 seconds, a glance at a printed explanation at 2.

Founder’s words

Cover to Cover is a reading companion tool I built for myself first.

For years I wanted to read the classics like A Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, Shakespeare. But I could never get past a few chapters or pages. So I built Cover to Cover as a reading companion. It is for people who are like me, who long to read the classic literature but find it difficult to read because of the density and difficulty of the language. It is here to make fluent reading and real comprehension of the classics possible, through useful annotation and other means.

Read the opening. Then decide.

The first pages of every book are free, with no account and no card. Real annotated text, not a sample page. If you are still reading when it runs out, that is your answer.

Then USD 6.99 a month opens every book in the library. Cancel at any time, and your place in each book is saved.

Explore the library

Which book should we annotate next?

The library grows. If the book you want is not here yet, tell us which one and we will email you when it is ready.

Your address is used for that one email and nothing else. See privacy.