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30,104 public-domain books, summarised. Page 22 of 628.

Edmond Dantès
Edmund Flagg
The past is a phantom that never truly rests, especially when the ghosts of vengeance return to haunt the man who once played God.

The Prairie Traveler: A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions
Randolph B. (Randolph Barnes) Marcy
Preparation is the only hedge against catastrophe for those who seek a new life in the American West.

Peter and Wendy
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
All children, except one, grow up; and that one is a boy who refuses to forfeit his youth, forever haunting the nursery windows of those who eventually must.

A Child's Garden of Verses
Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings. This collection of verse captures the sharp, shifting focus of a child’s inner life, where the mundane and the miraculous exist side by side.

Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
The modern heart beats in a wilderness of its own making, yearning for a lost wholeness it can neither name nor reach. To look upon this collection is to confront the quiet, aching pulse of an age caught between the fading light of ancient faith and the cold, unanswering dawn of a scientific world.

Fair Margaret: A Portrait
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
The stage is a mirror, and the world is a theatre where the masks we wear often reveal more of our true, suffering selves than we ever intend to share.

The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Unknown
The past is not a foreign country, but a mirror; look closely at the Greeks, and you will find the younger, sharper, and more deliberate face of your own civilization staring back at you.

The Jewish State
Theodor Herzl
A clear-eyed blueprint for a new national reality, this work argues that the Jewish question is not a social or religious concern, but an international political one that demands a sovereign territory of its own.

The Prodigal Father
J. Storer (Joseph Storer) Clouston
A man who has spent his life as the very portrait of Victorian respectability discovers, in his later years, that he is inexplicably growing younger—and decides to enjoy it.

'Smiles': A Rose of the Cumberlands
Eliot H. (Eliot Harlow) Robinson
A mountain girl’s radiant spirit transforms the lives of those she touches, proving that even in the deepest wilderness, the most profound power lies in the simple, courageous act of a smile.

Psychotherapy
Hugo Münsterberg
The mind holds a hidden power to reshape itself, turning the mechanisms of attention and belief into tools for healing the most stubborn nervous afflictions. By understanding the brain as a physical system, we can unlock the gates to our own recovery.

Lord Milner's Work in South Africa: From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902
W. Basil (William Basil) Worsfold
A firm hand guides a divided land through the crucible of war, seeking to forge a unified future from the wreckage of a collapsed order.

Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905
Various
The polished art of the magazine story offers a window into the anxieties and aspirations of a century past. Here, the pursuit of status, the perils of the highway, and the quiet weight of tradition define the human experience.

Three years in the Sixth Corps
George T. (George Thomas) Stevens
The mud, the marches, and the sudden, searing violence of the battlefield defined a generation. These pages capture the relentless, wearying reality of an army that lived, fought, and survived together through three years of war.

A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2)
John Stuart Mill
To unlock the secrets of clear thinking, one must first master the architecture of language and the iron laws of evidence.

The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5: Une Vie and Other Stories
Guy de Maupassant
The promises of youth inevitably collide with the harsh, indifferent grain of reality, leaving behind not grand tragedy, but the slow, quiet erosion of a life.

Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay
The contagion of irrational belief moves through whole nations as surely as a plague, turning common sense into madness and individual sanity into a collective, destructive obsession.

Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 03 (of 10): Filarete and Simone to Mantegna
Giorgio Vasari
Witness the rise of the masters whose hands transformed stone into spirit and pigment into history. This account captures the relentless innovation and fragile mortality of the individuals who forged the Italian Renaissance.

The Arabian Nights: Their Best-known Tales
Unknown
The world is a tapestry of shifting shadows and sudden light, where a single story can hold the power to save a life or unmake a king.

Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught: Comprising instructions in the selection and preparation of drawing instruments, elementary instruction in practical mechanical drawing
Joshua Rose
Precision in the workshop begins with the ability to translate a vision into a lines-based reality. This guide illuminates the path from blank paper to the rigorous, technical accuracy required by the modern machinist.

The Coming Wave
Oliver Optic
The secrets of the sea and the weight of a guilty conscience collide when a young man finds a fortune he cannot call his own.

Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse
The quest for meaning is rarely found in the destination, but in the unfolding of a life that must be lived, felt, and ultimately surrendered to the currents of time.

Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3)
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
A mind of immense range dissects the shifting tides of power, bringing the ghosts of history into sharp, urgent relief. Through these pages, the past is not a static record, but a living, breathing theater of human ambition.

The Dash for Khartoum: A Tale of the Nile Expedition
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
A soldier’s duty clashes with a brother’s desperate search in the heart of the desert, where loyalty is tested by war and the shifting sands of an unforgiving land.

The Highgrader
William MacLeod Raine
The mountain air of Colorado holds both a promise of freedom and the sharp sting of betrayal, where a woman’s heart and a man’s reputation are staked against the cold, hard logic of the law.

Memoirs to Illustrate the History of My Time, Volume 1
François Guizot
The weight of a crown is never found in the gold itself, but in the brittle, shifting ground of a nation struggling to reconcile its revolutionary past with its monarchical future.

Red Men and White
Owen Wister
A dusty, lawless world waits where the only justice is the kind a man carries in his holster or settles with a desperate, sudden gamble. Step into the sprawling, unforgiving frontier where silence is a choice and survival is a daily performance.

Fair Harbor
Joseph Crosby Lincoln
A seasoned, weary man finds himself unexpectedly cast as the steward of an eccentric seaside estate, where he must protect a fragile, unconventional home from the designs of a charming but predatory outsider.

The Happy Prince, and Other Tales
Oscar Wilde
High above the city, a gilded statue discovers that true beauty lies in the suffering of others, while elsewhere, a self-important firework awaits a glory that never arrives. These tales explore the fragile boundary between the heart’s capacity for sacrifice and the world’s enduring indifference.

Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence: The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of
Unknown
The echoes of a century of struggle and aspiration resonate in these voices, documenting a nation’s slow, painful birth into true democracy. This collection captures the urgent, eloquent demands for humanity made by those who refused to be silenced.

Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918
Callwell, C. E. (Charles Edward), Sir
The Great War was a conflict of unprecedented scale and bureaucratic complexity, fought not only in the trenches of France but in the crowded offices of Whitehall. Here is a rare, unvarnished look at the machinery of a modern empire struggling to adapt its traditions to the demands of total war.

The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor
Annie F. (Annie Fellows) Johnston
A bright, sheltered world of Kentucky house parties and wedding preparations awaits those who look beyond the surface, discovering that the most significant growth often happens in the quietest, most private moments of a girl’s life.

Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims
Jane G. (Jane Goodwin) Austin
A soldier of fortune turns his back on fame to guard a fragile band of exiles. In this harsh landscape, duty and devotion become the only weapons against starvation, silence, and the winter’s cold.

The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan
Ellen Gould Harmon White
The cosmic struggle between good and evil is not merely a historical record but a living drama, and you are cast in a leading role.

The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3): 1809-1859
John Morley
Born into the rigid hierarchies of the early nineteenth century, a young man of boundless energy and profound theological intensity navigates the treacherous currents of British governance to reshape the nation’s soul.

The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 2
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
The wanderer seeks in stone and sky a mirror for a restless soul, finding that while empires crumble into dust, the ache of human longing remains the only constant under the sun.

Werwolves
Elliott O'Donnell
Deep in the shadows of folklore, there exists a hunger that refuses to remain human. This exploration of the lycanthropic tradition traces the beast from ancient myth into the cold, modern light of the early twentieth century.

The Antichrist
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The shadow of a long, cold winter has fallen over the spirit of man, and only the most ruthless intellectual honesty can light the way back to the sun.

The vision of hell.: By Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
A man loses his way in a dark, terrifying forest, only to find that his only path forward is a descent into the deepest, most agonizing regions of the afterlife. This journey through the dark heart of the universe maps the geography of human failure, showing that even in the depths of ruin, there is a clear,…

The Big Bow Mystery
Israel Zangwill
A man is found murdered in a locked room with no way in or out. The mystery of his death becomes an obsession for a city, a puzzle for the police, and a dark game for one man.

The Story of the Greeks
H. A. (Hélène Adeline) Guerber
The ancient world lives through its legends, where gods and men collide, and the choices of a single king can alter the course of history for centuries to come.

The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 2, 1857-1870
Charles Dickens
Behind the public mask of the Victorian literary titan lies a restless, weary, and deeply observant man navigating the sunset of his life. These letters trace the final thirteen years of a relentless creative engine, chronicling a journey from the domestic sanctuary of Gad’s Hill to the exhausting, intoxicating…

The Task of Social Hygiene
Havelock Ellis
To improve society is not to force it into a rigid mold, but to foster the conditions where human life can expand, flourish, and achieve a newfound freedom from outdated, restrictive traditions.

History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens
George Washington Williams
A history of a people’s resilience, this account traces the long, arduous path from the shackles of slavery to the hard-won dignity of American citizenship and service.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
The world is not always as it seems, and sometimes, the only way to find out what lies beneath the surface is to follow a rabbit down a hole and see where the tumble leads.

The Works of Lord Byron. Vol. 5: Poetry
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
The restless spirit of a man who dared to look into the abyss, finding beauty in the ruins of empires and the contradictions of his own flawed, brilliant heart.

Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers
Unknown
A sudden turn of fate can strip a prince of his kingdom or a merchant of his home, but in these shifting lands, a single word of magic or a moment of patience may restore everything that was lost.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
William James
Discover how the deepest, most private moments of human belief shape a life, as ordinary individuals describe their encounters with an unseen reality that changes everything they know.