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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 166 of 714.

Highways and Byways in London
Emily Constance Baird Cook
The great, noisy, living city stretches out before the reader, revealed not through dry statistics but through a warm-hearted wanderer’s deliberate, sharp-eyed strolls down crowded thoroughfares and forgotten alleys.

Kim
Rudyard Kipling
A homeless Irish-English orphan boy navigates the vibrant, sprawling roads of British-ruled India, caught between the mystical quest of a Tibetan monk and the deadly shadow-games of imperial espionage.

Merrie England in the Olden Time, Vol. 2
George Daniel
Through tavern songs, fairground antics, and historical anecdotes, a vibrant panorama of traditional English revelry comes to life, set against the encroaching march of modern sobriety.

Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood: Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter
J. Conway (James Conway) Walter
A rich, decades-long survey of a Lincolnshire spa town, this historical guide unearths everything from ancient Roman fortifications and Cistercian ruins to lost birds of prey and local dialect.

The Biography of a Prairie Girl
Eleanor Gates
A blizzard rages across the Dakota plains as a newborn girl enters the world, fatherless from her first hours. She grows up in a sod-and-timber homestead where survival demands everything and beauty must be found on the wild prairie.

The Blue Bird for Children: The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness
Maurice Maeterlinck
Two poor woodcutter’s children set out on a magical Christmas quest across time, memory, and nature to capture a legendary blue bird that promises true happiness.

The Dance of Death: Exhibited in Elegant Engravings on Wood with a Dissertation on the Several Representations of that Subject but More Particularly on Those Ascribed to Macaber and Hans Holbein
Francis Douce
A meticulous antiquarian journey reveals how a medieval warning against human vanity transformed into one of Western art’s most enduring visual motifs.

The Intellectual Life
Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Cultivating the mind is a deliberate art of self-preservation, requiring physical discipline, emotional honesty, and a calculated defense of one's time against the trivialities of the world.

A Son of the Middle Border
Hamlin Garland
A relentless march westward shapes a boyhood of grueling labor and starry dreams, as a pioneer family chases prosperity across the changing American frontier.

Around the clock in Europe
Charles Fish Howell
A series of vivid hourly snapshots across the grand capitals of Europe captures the fleeting, sensory magic of early twentieth-century travel.

Cassell's History of England, Vol. 4 (of 8): From the Fall of Marlborough to the Peninsular War
Anonymous
A sprawling narrative traces Britain’s transformation across a pivotal century, where royal succession disputes, colonial uprisings, and world-shattering revolutions reshaped the global order.

Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria
Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna) Ragozin
Long before classical antiquity raised its marble temples, a vast civilization rose and fell along the alluvial banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, leaving its legacy buried under silent mounds of mud and sand.

Curiosities of the Sky
Garrett Putman Serviss
An examination of the cosmos where standard laws break down, revealing a universe governed by sudden stellar explosions, drifting stars, destroyed moons, and vast, terrifying voids.

Customs and Fashions in Old New England
Alice Morse Earle
Amid raw winter winds, cramped log dwellings, and severe pulpit admonitions, early American settlers fashioned a vibrant, highly particular, and deeply resilient domestic existence out of the wilderness.

Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers
W. A. (William Alexander) Clouston
Across diverse cultures and distant eras, human ingenuity shapes the same fundamental observations about foolishness, vanity, and moral truth into unforgettable stories.

History of Egypt From 330 B.C. To the Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12)
A. S. (Angelo Solomon) Rappoport
From the medieval Crusades and Napoleonic ambitions to the modern unraveling of the Nile's mysteries, Egypt’s past forms an unbroken chain of struggle, transformation, and discovery.

Mammonart: An essay in economic interpretation
Upton Sinclair
Art has never belonged to the dreamers; it has always been bought, paid for, and directed by the class that holds the purse strings.

Notes and Queries, Vol. V, Number 122, February 28, 1852: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc
Various
A lively Victorian tapestry of shared erudition, where nineteenth-century scholars and curious readers trade historical discoveries, resolve obscure literary puzzles, and preserve disappearing folklore through open, collaborative correspondence.

Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know
Unknown
A prince leaps over seven walls of spears to win a weightless princess, while an iron-bound captive tricks his savior into granting him three drinks of water. Global folklore gathers here to prove that wit, mercy, and sheer nerve build lasting wonder.

The Harvester
Gene Stratton-Porter
A man driven by a prophetic vision builds a woodland home for a nameless stranger, then hazards his heart and wealth to rescue her from poverty and heal her broken spirit.

The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller
Calvin Thomas
A young medical student secretly digests smuggled literature in a regimented academy, harboring a quiet ambition that will soon reshape German letters.

The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Evelyn Underhill
Ancient human longings for the absolute meet the empirical rigor of twentieth-century psychology in an investigation of spiritual existence. Written to bridge faith and modern science, the text examines how interior devotion translates into vibrant outward action.

The Public School Word-book: A conribution to to a historical glossary of words phrases and turns of expression obsolete and in current use peculiar to our great public schools together with some that have been or are modish at the universities
John Stephen Farmer
Inside the guarded gates of Britain's elite schools, boys speak an exclusive dialect built to preserve tradition and keep outsiders at bay.

The Southern South
Albert Bushnell Hart
An outsider explores the American South, examining its land, its economy, and the bitter divide between its black and white citizens.

Tobacco Leaves: Being a Book of Facts for Smokers
William Augustine Brennan
This compendium serves as a comprehensive, early 20th-century manual on the lifecycle of the tobacco plant, from its cultivation and curing to its manufacture and consumption.

Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French: Mexican War
Samuel Gibbs French
A West Point graduate traces a lifetime of soldiering from the dusty battlefields of the Mexican War to the blood-soaked trenches of the Confederacy, writing with unyielding conviction, quiet bitterness, and a survivor's sharp detail.

Vikram and the Vampire
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Bound by a solemn oath, a brave king trudges through the dark to carry a corpse, only to find a cunning spirit inside it that demands he solve a series of perplexing riddles.

A New Voyage to Carolina: Containing the exact description and natural history of that country
John Lawson
A vivid, detail-rich survey of the eighteenth-century American frontier, combining a treacherous overland journey with meticulous natural history and a candid account of Indigenous cultures.

Ancient Egypt
George Rawlinson
A narrow corridor of fertile black soil fed by an extraordinary river emerges from harsh deserts to foster one of humanity's earliest and most enduring civilizations.

Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs and Results
Eugene S. (Eugene Solomon) Talbot
A chilling, clinically detailed examination of the physical and psychological markers of inherited decline, tracing the path from ancestral instability to modern social ailments through the lens of nineteenth-century medicine.

France and England in North America, Part II: The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century
Francis Parkman
A band of seventeenth-century French Jesuits marches into the deep North American wilderness, armed only with rosaries and conviction, seeking to transform native souls before a brutal intertribal war consumes them all.

Mountain Craft
Unknown
Climbing mountains requires technical mastery, psychological discipline, and a profound respect for the uncompromising nature of high altitudes.

Spenser's Faerie Queene, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Edmund Spenser
A questing knight rides through monster-haunted wilds, guided by a maiden whose lands have fallen to a dragon. Across enchanted islands and shadowy bowers, every trial tests whether human virtue can endure against the world's deep deceits.

Tales of the Fish Patrol
Jack London
In the windswept waters of San Francisco Bay, teenage patrolmen wage a dangerous, high-stakes game of speed and strategy against ruthless illegal fishermen.

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Weldon Johnson
A light-skinned child of an unsanctioned biracial union grows up to move fluidly across the American color line, choosing safety over identity in a society obsessed with racial caste.

The Cambridge natural history, Vol. 08 (of 10)
Hans Gadow
Beyond the cold definitions of biological taxonomy lies a world where structural adaptation shapes life, revealing the precise evolutionary elegance of cold-blooded creatures in their natural haunts.

The Invention of Printing.: A Collection of Facts and Opinions, Descriptive of Early Prints and Playing Cards, the Block-Books of the Fifteenth Century, the Legend of Lourens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem, and the Work of John Gutenberg and His Associates
Theodore Low De Vinne
Before mechanical types could reorder the world, human hands spent centuries refining the arts of pressure, carving, and ink. The modern printed page is not a sudden miracle, but the culmination of a long, deliberate mechanical evolution.

The Lion's Whelp: A Story of Cromwell's Time
Amelia E. Barr
When political fracture forces neighbours onto opposite sides of a national divide, personal loyalty becomes the most dangerous form of courage.

The Shadow of a Sin
Charlotte M. Brame
Driven by an impulsive wish to escape a loveless marriage, a young heiress runs away into the night, only to end up entangled in a murder trial that threatens her honor and her true love.

What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales
H. C. (Hans Christian) Andersen
A lonely painter sitting in his night attic receives visits from the night sky, while across distant forests, frozen rivers, and quiet villages, ordinary people and strange creatures learn what it costs to live, love, and die.

A Brief Handbook of English Authors
Oscar Fay Adams
A compact reference guide gathers hundreds of English literary figures into a single accessible volume. It offers immediate bibliographic details, critical summaries, and publishing contexts for readers seeking quick facts without consulting massive multi-volume encyclopedias.

Animal Figures in the Maya Codices
Alfred M. (Alfred Marston) Tozzer
An exact zoological lens decodes the stylized fauna of ancient Maya manuscripts, revealing how real beasts became holy symbols.

Flagg's The Far West, 1836-1837, part 2
Edmund Flagg
A sweeping journey through the American West captures a continent in transition, where wild landscapes, vanishing frontier posts, and devout missionary encounters meet.

Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: The Records of an Eventful Life (Vol. 1 of 2)
Bertha von Suttner
A privileged youth in high-society Austria gives way to a life of artistic searching, romantic defiance, and an outspoken crusade for world peace.

Notes on democracy
H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken
The masses embrace fraud and flee from reason, turning the sacred promise of self-governance into an endless, hilarious circus.

Railway Adventures and Anecdotes: Extending over More Than Fifty Years
Unknown
Iron tracks redefine time and distance, transforming a hesitant world through the raw power of steam, human ambition, and unforeseen peril.

The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2): with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest
John Fiske
Over centuries of patient navigation and brutal contact, the collision of two isolated halves of the earth reshaped human geography forever.

The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson Compiled From Family Letters and Reminiscences
Sarah N. (Sarah Nicholas) Randolph
A grand granddaughter’s gentle, affectionate portrait of Thomas Jefferson reveals a devoted father and grandfather who preferred his home, books, and family above all public honors.