At Cheever Books, a rare and used bookstore that’s been selling printed pieces of the past for more than 30 years, things tend to move at the speed of history.

But one type of book all but flies off the shelf.

We’re talking books on Latin grammar and history. Books on Latin philosophy and literature. Latin dictionaries. Books written in Latin, a language that’s been dead as a spoken tongue for centuries.

At the quaint, columned blue house at 3613 Broadway, where some 60,000 books line the shelves, hunker in hallways and lie stacked on every conceivable surface, works linked to the language of ancient Rome have become unexpected best-sellers.

“Some people have aspirations for a classical education,” said John Peace, the bookstore’s manager and buyer, roaming its labyrinthine hallways to pluck a representative text off a shelf.

He opens up an aged-looking book called “Exercises in Latin Prose Composition,” written by F. Ritchie and published in 1910. With a price tag of $15, the pages reveal script in English and Latin, the latter looking exotic yet somehow familiar to anyone who’s seen “Ben-Hur” or “The Gladiator.”

Next, he shows a couple of Latin-English textbooks that a mother planned to purchase for her son, to deepen his classical knowledge and augment his public high school education, depending on the price. (Peace determined each was worth $25.) Another is from a student series of Latin classics based on Horace’s Odes, Epodes, Satires and Epistles, published in 1898.

“We sell about one or two books about Latin or in Latin a week,” said Peace, dressed in a black T-shirt, an unlit cigarette clutched in his fingers.

Many customers are parents whose children are homeschooled or attend charter schools, said saleswoman Marcia Raphael.

Peace finds Latin-related books through estate sales, or buys them from people who bring in a late loved one’s books to sell. He researches the volumes to determine their value and histories. Some are first editions dating back years, decades, even centuries.

“We have to be careful with this one,” he said, picking up “Numerorum Mysteria.” Italian writer Pietro Bongo wrote his examination of the significance of numerology in the Old Testament and other numerical subjects in 1585, Peace said. The book is priced at $5,000.

“I did some research on (Bongo) and he was very well-respected in mathematical circles,” Peace said. “I bought this book from a guy who got it out of a storage facility.”

Peace delicately thumbs through the pages, weathered and thin, lined with copious and complicated Latin script. The pages are handmade paper derived from sawdust and cloth, Peace said.

“They made all the paper like that in the 1500s,” he said. “I looked all over and couldn’t find another first-edition copy of this book. We’re lucky to have it whole.”

The benefits of Latin

Though a dead language, classical Latin — which remained the elite lingo of science, law, medicine and literature long after the fall of Rome — is studied by scads of Texas school children.

Last year, more than 15,000 public and charter schools students in Texas took some iteration of Latin, from kindergarten jingles all the way to advanced high school classes, according to the Texas Education Agency.

The focus is especially intense at Great Hearts Academies, a nonprofit charter school chain that offers a classic liberal arts education.

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At the three San Antonio campuses — a fourth is scheduled to open in August — the curriculum is heavy on works from ancient Greece and Rome, the medieval world and stalwarts of the Western canon, such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

Executive Director Andrew Ellison — a fan of Cheever Books who began his career in public education 20 years ago as an eighth-grade Latin teacher — said Latin is a required course in the lower grades at Great Hearts. Students move from an oral study of Latin to learning to read and write in the language by middle school. The class becomes an advanced elective in high school.

More than 1,200 Great Hearts students are studying Latin at any given time, Ellison said, and the benefits are many.

“Two-thirds of the English vocabulary is derived from Latin or Latin as it moved through French in the Middle Ages,” he said. “Knowing Latin makes students into better readers, writers and speakers of English. And Latin is the parent language of Spanish and the other Romance languages of French and Portuguese.”

Learning the ancient language connects students to the common history of Western civilization, he said.

“It helps students understand the culture and connect that knowledge to our 21st century diverse America,” he said. Students are provided with Latin textbooks, but some parents no doubt buy additional books to deepen and broaden their children’s reading, he said.

“We’re making a future customer base for Cheever Books,” he quipped.

At Health Careers High School, a magnet school in the Northside Independent School District, Latin teacher John Chu said the subject is crucial for students planning to go into health care.

“Latin is deeply rooted in medical terminology, so it’s very good to know it for practical reasons,” said Chu, who has taught Latin at the school for 13 years. About 170 of the school’s 850 students take Latin as part of the district’s two-year foreign language requirement or as an elective, he said.

But Chu — who takes his students on a tour of Italy, Rome and Pompeii every other summer — said Latin provides students with far more than just knowing their way around a medical file.

“It helps unlock not just the world of language but the ancient world of culture and history and mythology, and we can learn from that,” he said. “We can also learn from the mistakes and problematic areas of the history of the ancients.”

Did you know, for example, that Julius Caesar — a brilliant politician and military general — also “sowed the seeds of authoritarianism?” asked Chu. His tendency to consolidate power for himself put the Roman Republic at risk, a lesson that might hold some resonances for modern times.

“With Latin, as with other classes, we’re teaching students to be critical thinkers,” Chu said.

Inga Cotton, whose son Nicholas, 11, takes sixth-grade Latin at Great Hearts Academy, said she can see the long-term value.

“It’s important to me that he become a masterful user of the English language, and Latin really helps with that,” she said.

The class is now among her son’s favorites. He recently asked her to buy a copy of the Latin translation of A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” — “Winnie Ille Pu.”

“I found it on Amazon,” she said.

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Rare and used books in Latin or about Latin can be found on the internet. But Peace said the folks who forage at Cheever Books come for a different experience. They want to hold a book in their hands. They want to take the time to browse. They want to discover something they may not have even known they wanted.

“They want to see what’s there, and not just be told by somebody what to buy,” he said.

Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje is a staff writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | mstoeltje@express-news.net | Twitter: @mstoeltje