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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 224 of 714.

Birds and Man
W. H. (William Henry) Hudson
A quiet observation of nature reveals a living world far richer, more perceptive, and deeply interwoven with human emotion than our usual hurried glances ever allow us to see.

Byron: The Last Phase
Richard Edgcumbe
A fiery, erratic genius undergoes a late-life metamorphosis, leaving behind European dissipation to lead a desperate war for liberty in Greece.

Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
William Diller Matthew
Deep within ancient layers of earth and stone lies the forgotten blueprint of a lost world, where giant reptiles ruled vanished continents.

Edgar Huntly
Charles Brockden Brown
Driven by an obsessive need to uncover the truth behind a friend's mysterious murder, a young man wanders into the nocturnal wilderness of Pennsylvania, only to lose his grip on reality in a nightmare of sleepwalking, violence, and survival.

Farmers of Forty Centuries
F. H. (Franklin Hiram) King
Sustainable earth-conquest demands learning how East Asian farmers feed vast populations on tiny plots without depleting soil fertility over thousands of years.

Flowers of Freethought (Second Series)
G. W. (George William) Foote
Stripping away centuries of pious decoration, a militant freethinker subjects religious dogma to the unrelenting cold light of historical fact and secular reason.

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II
Various
A vibrant snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century thought, culture, and narrative craft, blending commentary on great literary figures with reportage on industrial marvels, historical drama, serial fiction, and political news.

Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Reading about chivalry until his mind fractures, an aging Spanish country gentleman arms himself with rusted iron, adopts the title Don Quixote, and rides across La Mancha to impose archaic knightly ideals upon a unchivalrous world.

Motion pictures, 1974
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
This is an exhaustive official ledger of American cinematic output, providing a rigid, bureaucratic snapshot of the moving image as it was registered for legal protection in 1974. It serves as a stark, objective inventory of the commercial, educational, and artistic media produced during a specific year of the…

Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour
Robert Smith Surtees
An audacious sponger works his way through the English countryside, riding other men’s horses and eating other men’s dinners, in a world where everyone is trying to swindle everyone else.

Myths and Folk-tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars
Jeremiah Curtin
To enter these Eastern European folk tales is to step into a landscape where the ordinary world dissolves, replaced by iron-clawed climbs, golden-maned steeds, and beasts that speak with the voices of men.

New Poems
Francis Thompson
In the quiet, walled spaces of the soul, earthly love and divine hunger tangle until pain becomes the only true measure of grace.

Opuscula: Essays chiefly Philological and Ethnographical
R. G. (Robert Gordon) Latham
Philological inquiry often seeks the hidden architecture of human history, tracing the migrations and kinships of distant peoples through the shifting patterns of their speech. This collection of essays serves as a rigorous, scholarly record of such investigations, bridging the gap between clinical observation and…

Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language
Samuel Johnson
An unsparing account of human ambition confronting the chaotic reality of living speech, this masterwork captures a solitary mind attempting to map, order, and preserve an entire national tongue.

Pussy and Doggy Tales
E. (Edith) Nesbit
A mother cat spins fables to quiet her restless kittens, while pampered house pets scheme, misbehave, and negotiate life alongside their human masters.

Recollections of a Varied Life
George Cary Eggleston
Life in mid-nineteenth-century America moves across trackless prairies and bloody battlefields toward the bustling editorial rooms of New York. Personal memory weaves a nation’s rustic past into its modern literary awakening.

Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69
Edward Whymper
Scaling jagged, untamed peaks demands relentless physical grit, a keen eye for terrain, and an unflinching acceptance of deadly risk.

Ships of the seven seas
Hawthorne Daniel
Across thousands of years of human ingenuity, the sea has yielded to muscle, canvas, and steam.

Sonnets from the Crimea
Adam Mickiewicz
A vast steppe swallows the traveler, where grass falls like foam and only the stars offer a path toward home.

The Boy Spy: A substantially true record of secret service during the war of the rebellion, a correct account of events witnessed by a soldier
Joseph Orton Kerbey
Drifting in a darkened rowboat across phosphorescent Southern waters, a teenager hazards everything to slip past enemy lines and deliver intelligence to an imperiled Union fleet.

The Captain of the Wight: A Romance of Carisbrooke Castle in 1488
Frank Cowper
A high-spirited teenager leaves his ancestral home to serve a famous lord, plunging into a world of knightly tournaments, dark family secrets, and a doomed military expedition across the English Channel.
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast
William Cowper Brann
A fiery Texas journalist picks up his pen to tear down hypocrisy, bigotry, and corruption across the late nineteenth-century American landscape.

The Diary of a Freshman
Charles Macomb Flandrau
An idealist leaves home for Cambridge, learning that navigating college requires balancing well-meaning parental advice with the realities of friendship, academic slip-ups, and social belonging.

The Divine Office: A Study of the Roman Breviary
Edward J. Quigley
To pray well is a lifelong labor, requiring as much attention to history and form as to the movements of the heart.

The Great War in England in 1897
William Le Queux
A hostile coalition launches a surprise invasion of Great Britain, tearing through neglected coastal defences and pushing an unprepared nation into a desperate, bloody fight for its survival.

The Little Review, January-February 1916 (Vol. 2, No. 10)
Various
Stripping away traditional artistic boundaries, this avant-garde journal captures the electric friction between rising modernists and the rigid cultural norms of early twentieth-century America.

The mystery of Easter island: the story of an expedition
Katherine Routledge
Setting sail in a private yacht on the eve of the First World War, an intrepid couple embarks on a voyage to Easter Island to solve the enduring mystery of its giant stone sentinels.

The Pirates of Ersatz
Murray Leinster
An ambitious young electronic engineer uses cleverness, stolen tech, and opportunistic piracy to outwit feudal lords and galactic authorities.

The Radio Amateur's Hand Book: A Complete, Authentic and Informative Work on Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony
A. Frederick (Archie Frederick) Collins
A clear, practical guide to early twentieth-century wireless technology, teaching the home hobbyist how to build, wire, tune, and operate radio receiving and transmitting equipment from scratch.

The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation. Volume 1
Charles Roger
From wilderness trading post to a fractious, bustling colony on the brink of self-rule, this sweeping nineteenth-century narrative chronicles the improbable rise of British North America.

The Rules of the Game
Stewart Edward White
A young man goes west to build his fortune in timber, only to find that the law, the forests, and the rules of success are changing beneath his feet.

The Secret of a Happy Home (1896)
Marion Harland
A gentle, practical manual for daily living, this 1896 guidebook argues that a peaceful household is built not on great fortunes or grand gestures, but on unselfishness, mutual respect, and quiet daily patience.

The Settler
Herman Whitaker
Over a vast, sweep-washed frontier, a rugged pioneer and an educated young woman navigate the quiet fractures of a hasty marriage, matched against the brutal forces of nature and a changing Canadian prairie.

The Tiger of Mysore: A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib
G. A. (George Alfred) Henty
To a young Englishman in the late eighteenth century, India is an expanse of rumor and peril, where a father can vanish into thin air and a hostile tyrant rules from the fortress of Seringapatam.

The War History of the 4th Battalion, the London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers), 1914-1919
F. Clive Grimwade
A citizen army of London clerks and tradesmen takes to the mud of the Western Front, writing its history in stubborn resistance and quiet endurance.

The Waterloo Campaign, 1815
William Siborne
Four days in June 1815 decided the fate of Europe, ending decades of imperial ambition and establishing a forty-year peace through blood, mud, and unprecedented military precision.

Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia, and Laos (Vol. 2 of 2): During the Years 1858, 1859, and 1860
Henri Mouhot
A mid-nineteenth-century European explorer braves dense jungles, lethal fevers, and unpredictable mountain passes to chart the ancient temples, hidden waterways, and interior kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth
Unknown
A primary, firsthand record of the Plymouth Plantation’s early months, this journal captures the raw struggle, diplomacy, and survival of the small group that established a new life on the Massachusetts coast.

A Student's History of England, v. 2: 1509-1689: From the Earliest Times to the Death of King Edward VII
Samuel Rawson Gardiner
This historical account navigates the volatile century and a half that transformed the English monarchy from a personal, absolute rule into a constitutional power shaped by Parliament and the spirit of the Renascence.

A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola: Eighth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1886-1887, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1891, pages 3-228
Cosmos Mindeleff
An architectural tradition born of sandstone, mud, and defensive necessity takes root upon the desolate mesas of the American Southwest.

A Study of Shakespeare
Algernon Charles Swinburne
An ocean cannot be measured with a yardstick, and the depth of poetic genius yields only to the human ear.

A Thin Ghost and Others
M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
Quiet English towns and scholarly rectories harbor malevolent, lingering entities that stir when ancient tombs are unsealed, curio cabinets searched, or old fabrics unrolled.

Antonina
Wilkie Collins
An ancient empire crumbles from within as barbarian hordes gather at its gates, forcing a pious young woman and a decadent senator to face the terrifying abyss of human nature.

Apollonius of Tyana, the Philosopher-Reformer of the First Century A.D
G. R. S. (George Robert Stow) Mead
An examination of the first-century philosopher reveals a world rich in ascetic discipline, temple reform, and mysterious spiritual authority.

Atta Troll
Heinrich Heine
An escaped dancing bear preaches radical egalitarianism to his cubs, only to be hunted through the Pyrenees by an exiled poet and a half-dead assassin.

Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt
Franz Liszt
An intense artistic rescue mission unfolds in intimate letters between a exile in despair and a virtuoso willing to move mountains to bring revolutionary music to the world.

Cricket
A. G. (Allan Gibson) Steel
Cricket is a foundational technical manual and historical survey of the sport, offering a comprehensive look at the mechanics of batting, bowling, and field placement as understood by late-Victorian experts. It serves as both a practical guide for the aspiring player and a rich, anecdotal chronicle of the game’s…

Dialogues in French and English
William Caxton
Every phrase needed to navigate a medieval marketplace, order a meal, or settle an account sits arranged here in twin columns of Middle English and Early Modern French.