Reading frenzy: Lehi-based The Good and the Beautiful to give away 200,000 books this summer
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- Workers package books at The Good and the Beautiful headquarters Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Lehi.
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- Workers package books at The Good and the Beautiful headquarters Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Lehi.
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- Workers package books at The Good and the Beautiful headquarters Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Lehi.
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- The Good and the Beautiful headquarters as seen Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Lehi.
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- The Good and the Beautiful headquarters as seen Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Lehi.
Tuesday afternoon was a typical day at The Good and the Beautiful’s new 100,000-square-foot warehouse in Lehi, with a handful of workers scattered about assembling boxes and packaging orders.
Soon, though, the facility will be bustling with dozens of temporary workers as the company prepares for one of its busiest times of the year: the summer reading program.
The Lehi-based Christian homeschool curriculum company founded by musician and homeschool mom Jenny Phillips started the summer reading program five years ago, shipping 75,000 free books to families.
The volume has steadily grown to where the company will ship out 200,000 free books this year. People can sign up on the company’s website to find out when the program launches this year. The company sends families a book that matches their child’s age.
“The first day of the sale is actually pretty insane for us,” Chief Operating Officer Brian Bartholomew said. “You watch our sales and they just go through the roof. You have tens of thousands of orders on the first day and it tapers off from there. But it’s exciting to watch the families get excited about it.”
The objective is to provide fun and wholesome literature that will keep kids engaged in reading, according to Patch Crowe, senior director of media. Books that are part of the program are either written by Phillips or a The Good and the Beautiful team member, or are from outside authors who are on the company’s approved book list. Families do not have to be part of the company’s homeschool program to participate.
“A lot of it is just fun and exciting for kids to be able to read books that they can really resonate with, that talk about kids and parents in a really positive light, that tell, that share great values, that share great stories and life lessons,” Crowe said.
Nika Dibb, a Highland mom who teaches her children The Good and the Beautiful curriculum, said they have participated in the summer-reading program for several years. She said her kids get excited to get a book in the mail and read a new story.
This year’s program will be particularly memorable for the Dibb family because one of the free book series being shipped this year, “The Legend of Bluebell Forest,” was written by Nika Dibb’s daughter, Isabelle, who is a student at Brigham Young University.
“She’s always loved to write,” Nika Dibb said. “She had always been doodling with stories and just had them for fun and stuff. And then she ended up taking a class with Jenny, and she gave them the opportunity to submit some manuscripts to their team, and they picked that one and helped her go through the whole publishing process and everything.”
Isabelle’s series will join the list of books that are likely to be in high demand. The inventory is expected to be gone in just two weeks, according to Bartholomew.
The high demand is seen not just in the summer-reading program but the company as a whole, according to The Good and the Beautiful leadership.
What once started with Phillips building a curriculum for her own children has turned into an established Christian-based learning company that ships language arts, math, science and history curriculum to families worldwide.
The company opened a new warehouse, store and music hall in Lehi in November. Crowe said when they started building it two years ago, it was planned to accommodate four times the growth, and that they are already at capacity.
Bartholomew said there is a real demand for wholesome educational content.
“There’s a ton of content out there, but a lot of parents like myself are concerned about what’s in that content, what’s teaching their children. What messaging is coming from that?” he said. “And so on top of that, in the screen world that we live in, there are parents who are looking for opportunities to get their kids off of screens. And so I think because of those two factors, they drive parents to come find, you know, things that they can consume that are value-based and not on a screen.”
