Start Plutarch a decade early. Finish with the real thing.
And Marcus Aurelius, and Machiavelli, and Beowulf, and…
🤓 😍 📚
nüNERD publishes real history, philosophy, and classic literature for kids ages 0–14, with every topic built as its own book at each reading level, never a leveled-down rewrite. We take the subjects other publishers skip and build each into a ladder of books, from first picture book to a prep book for the real Parallel Lives.
Ages 0–4
Read to them
Ages 3–7
Read to them + Read together
Ages 6–10
Read together + Read alone
Ages 10–14
Final prep for the original source
Newest release
Cleopatra
Big Ideas · Ages 0–12
Cleopatra, taught four ways. Ages 0 to 4 meet the girl who learned to greet every visitor to Alexandria in their own language. Ages 3 to 7 get the underestimated bookworm who out-thought everyone who wrote her off. Ages 6 to 10 get the whole life of the last pharaoh, set against the legend her enemies invented. And ages 9 to 12 get a Secret Nerd book in her own voice: the flood gauges, the calendar, the queen who ran Egypt on her wits.
See all editionsThe catalog
Demosthenes & Cicero
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Demosthenes and Cicero, the greatest orators of Greece and Rome, retold for kids at four reading levels from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
Lycurgus & Numa
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Lycurgus and Numa, the lawgivers of Sparta and ancient Rome, retold for kids at four reading levels from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
Ulysses
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
James Joyce’s Ulysses is routinely named the greatest novel of the twentieth century, and almost nobody reads it before college, if ever.
Theseus & Romulus
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Two young men, born centuries and a sea apart, each took a crowd of quarreling strangers and turned them into a city: one built Athens, one built Rome, and both have outlived their founders by three thousand years.
Alexander & Caesar
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Two of the most successful conquerors who ever lived were driven by the same thing: a hunger to be the greatest, with no point at which either one ever felt he had enough.
Marcus Aurelius
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The most powerful man in the world kept a private notebook about how to be a better person, and he never meant a single word of it to be read.
Alfred the Great
Ages 0–12 · 4 books
A king who hides in a swamp, burns a stranger’s bread, then rallies a comeback that saves an entire country, and his real secret weapon turns out to be books.
Machiavelli
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
For five hundred years “Machiavellian” has meant sneaky and untrustworthy, but the man behind the word was neither.
Stoicism
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
A toppled block tower on a Tuesday morning is the exact problem Marcus Aurelius was working out in his journal: what do you do when something you cannot control wrecks your day?
Don Quixote
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The most famous novel in the world, and most people don’t read it until college, if they read it at all.
Beowulf
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The oldest story in English literature nearly burned in a library fire in 1731, and survived by inches.
New series
Plutarch’s Lives for Kids
The two-thousand-year-old paired lives, built at four reading levels, from first picture book to Plutarch-ready.
Free printable pack
Your first Plutarch lesson, tonight
Fifteen minutes, no books required. The free family pack opens with a ready-to-run first lesson on Alexander and Caesar, then gives you the printable 25-pair Parallel Lives wall map, a parent’s guide to starting early, and real pages from all four reading levels. Plus one email when each new book goes live. No noise.