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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 279 of 714.

Library Bookbinding
Arthur Low Bailey
A practical handbook detailing the structural mechanics, material selection, and administrative routines required to keep library books durable under heavy public circulation.

McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 6, October, 1908
Various
A turn-of-the-century cultural tapestry capturing American life through public art, international warfare, industrial legislation, and the quiet struggles of everyday people.

Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe: Wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe, Bt., Ambassador from Charles II to the Courts of Portugal and Madrid
Ann Fanshawe
Faithful companions through exile, war, and foreign courts, a royalist couple navigates the collapse and resurrection of the Stuart monarchy.

Parsifal: A Mystical Drama by Richard Wagner Retold in the Spirit of the Bayreuth Interpretation
Richard Wagner
A pure-hearted youth wanders into a sacred forest, unaware that his innocence holds the key to healing a broken kingdom and redeeming a fallen world.

Retrospect of Western Travel, Volume 1 (of 2)
Harriet Martineau
A single transatlantic voyage opens into an expansive journey across nineteenth-century America, where wild landscapes and urban ambitions collide.

Seed-time and Harvest: A Novel
Fritz Reuter
Grief and ruin strip an honest tenant farmer of his estate, yet the quiet rhythm of rural life keeps spinning around him. Across the estate houses and village parsonages of Pomerania and Mecklenburg, human folly continuously tussles with steady decency.

Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862
Henry Morford
Set against the backdrop of a nation torn by Civil War, Henry Morford’s 1863 novel captures the home-front anxieties and military conflicts of a defining era.

Stories from the Greek Tragedians
Alfred John Church
Fate, divine commands, and human passions collide in dramatic retellings that strip ancient theater down to its essential, unforgettable narratives.

The Boy Scouts on the Range
John Henry Goldfrap
Across the sun-baked, red-dust expanses of northern Arizona, a group of Eastern boys learns to ride, rope, and navigate the unforgiving frontier while battling rustlers and local tribes.

The Bright Face of Danger: Being an Account of Some Adventures of Henri de Launay, Son of the Sieur de la Tournoire
Robert Neilson Stephens
A young nobleman sets out on a ridiculous duel of pride, only to be swept into a dark vortex of domestic tyranny, treason, and deadly peril.

The Common Sense of Socialism: A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg
John Spargo
Written as a direct epistolary address to an American factory worker, this plain-spoken treatise dismantles the economic status quo to argue that true democracy requires collective ownership of the nation's industrial wealth.

The Community Cook Book
Anonymous
A pragmatic collection of early twentieth-century American recipes offers an honest, reliable window into the heart of domestic life and community nourishment.

The Insect Folk
Margaret Warner Morley
An inviting field guide to the insect world uses conversational rambles around ponds and meadows to teach children how to observe nature closely.

The Little House in the Fairy Wood
Ethel Cook Eliot
An abused orphan escapes a harsh human household into a realm of forest spirits, where a fairy mother and child teach him how to see the magic of the wild world.

The Messenger
Elizabeth Robins
A young woman’s unwavering personal devotion collides with the icy reality of wartime espionage, testing whether trust can survive when patriotism turns every intimacy into a weapon.

The Mysterious Rider
Zane Grey
On a high mountain ranch in Colorado, a waif’s devotion to her adopted father is tested when she is bound to marry his worthless son.

The Quest: The authorized translation from the Dutch of De kleine Johannes
Frederik van Eeden
A young boy leaves behind his childhood garden to wander through a world of fairies, cold science, and social struggle, searching for the ultimate truth that can reconcile the beauty of nature with human suffering.

The Riddle and the Ring
Gordon MacLaren
A penniless man in wintertime New York steps out of desperation and straight into a web of mistaken identity, high-society intrigue, and dangerous international secrets.

The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace
Horace
Wisdom arrives when we trade the reckless ambition of youth for a quiet place in the countryside and a well-curated shelf.

The Voice on the Wire
Eustace Hale Ball
An aristocratic criminologist and a stage performer match wits against a sinister mastermind who uses high-tech telephony and a city-wide criminal network to terrorize New York's wealthiest elite.

Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West
Austin Steward
Born into Virginia slavery, Austin Steward endured twenty-two years of brutal bondage before gaining his freedom, establishing a business, and eventually helping lead an ambitious colony for fugitive slaves in Canada West.

Views and Reviews: Essays in appreciation: Literature
William Ernest Henley
This critical collection strips away Victorian pretense to evaluate literature through an unyielding, craftsmanlike lens. It delivers sharp, unfiltered judgments on the great writers and cultural icons of the modern era.

Bahaism and Its Claims: A Study of the Religion Promulgated by Baha Ullah and Abdul Baha
Samuel Graham Wilson
This polemical survey investigates the origins, theological claims, and internal history of a religious movement emerging from nineteenth-century Persia, challenging its self-presentation as a universal faith for the modern age. It acts as a critical counter-narrative, scrutinizing the movement's growth and its…

Mysteria
Otto Henne am Rhyn
A quiet hunger for secrecy drives human history. Otto Henne am Rhyn traces how esoteric rites, hidden orders, and mystical dogmas evolved from ancient temple sanctuaries into modern political fraternities.

Ayala's Angel
Anthony Trollope
She chases an impossible dream of perfection until she learns that real love wears an surprisingly human face.

Carried Off: A Story of Pirate Times
Esmè Stuart
An English farm boy and a young Spanish noble are drawn together across the divide of captivity, war, and the bloody rampages of Henry Morgan's buccaneers.

History of the Postage Stamps of the United States of America
John K. (John Kerr) Tiffany
A chronicle of administrative ambition, technical trial, and aesthetic change reveals how localized postmaster decisions evolved into a vast federal apparatus for prepaid postage across nineteenth-century America.

Putnam's Handy Law Book for the Layman
Albert Sidney Bolles
A practical 1921 guide to American commercial law, demystifying daily legal obligations for non-lawyers across property, contracts, business, and personal liability.

The Man Whom the Trees Loved
Algernon Blackwood
An old forestry officer's soul is slowly drawn into the collective consciousness of the woods, driving a wedge between his quiet life and his terrified wife.

Beautiful Bulbous Plants for the Open Air
John Weathers
Cultivating bulbs transforms a garden into an extraordinary display of color, provided the grower respects the silent, subterranean mechanics of root, corm, and soil.

Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics
Michael F. (Michael Frederic) Guyer
A scientific argument for controlling human breeding, this work frames heredity as an unyielding biological law that dictates the future of society.

Betty Trevor
Vaizey, George de Horne, Mrs.
In a grey London square full of busy homes, a doctor’s daughter learns to navigate the noisy demands of family, the pull of quiet romances, and the unexpected choices that shape a woman's life.

Lady Barbarina, The Siege of London, An International Episode, and Other Tales
Henry James
Crossed-cultural romance falters when high-born English propriety meets raw American wealth, forcing both sides to weigh social vanity against personal freedom.

Popular misgovernment in the United States
Alfred Byron Cruikshank
A passionate, unyielding assault on universal suffrage, this legal treatise argues that opening the ballot box to the unpropertied mass has degraded American democracy into a reign of corruption.

Scotch Wit and Humor
W. H. (Walter Henry) Howe
A dry, sharp humor quieted by earnestness and thrift runs straight through these short sketches, proving that a serious people still hold an abundance of point, playfulness, and shrewd wit.

Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match
Francis C. (Francis Channing) Woodworth
A varied assembly of quadruped anecdotes reveals how animals think, feel, and act when interacting with each other and the human world.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
The heavy weight of wartime survival presses hard against the quiet longings of ordinary human hearts.

The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers
Mary Cholmondeley
A family legacy of stolen Indian gems sets off a tangled web of deceit, mistaken identities, and unexpected romantic entanglements across English country estates.

The Early Christians in Rome
H. D. M. (Henry Donald Maurice) Spence-Jones
An obscure, persistent community grows inside a hostile imperial capital, enduring centuries of legal suspicion, public execution, and underground survival until its sudden elevation across the Roman world.

The Ethnology of the British Islands
R. G. (Robert Gordon) Latham
An ambitious attempt to unearth the ancestral origins of the British peoples by peeling back layers of written history, archaeology, and comparative linguistics.

The Golden Skull: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story
Harold L. (Harold Leland) Goodwin
A shadowy figure stalks a teenager across Manila Bay, launching a high-stakes search through the rugged Philippine highlands for a lost tribal treasure.

The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 05
Unknown
A single city grows to command the Mediterranean world, only to find its constitutional order shattered by the very power, wealth, and military commanders its conquests created.

The Sign of Silence
William Le Queux
A dead woman in a bachelor's flat, a stolen identity, and a trail of poisonous serpents lead an innocent man across Europe in search of the truth.

The Untouchable
Stephen A. Kallis
An inventor's gift becomes an unreachable paradox when a device that slips through solid matter accidentally turns itself permanently beyond human physical touch.

Treachery in Outer Space
Carey Rockwell
Rough-edged space opera from the early atomic age, where teenaged cadets run radar, balance reactors, and trade heavy-handed hazing between high-stakes rocket launches.

Wee Wifie
Rosa Nouchette Carey
A gentle, earnest Victorian romance of mistaken motives and deep devotion, where lost souls find their way home through patience and quiet forgiveness.

Adventures on the Roof of the World
Le Blond, Aubrey, Mrs.
High above the timberline, where sheer rock meets shifting ice, the margin between triumph and catastrophe is razor-thin. This collection captures the stark reality of early mountaineering, where a single misstep, a damp match, or a sudden roar can rewrite a life in seconds.

Religion and Lust
Weir, James, Jr.
A late-nineteenth-century alienist traces religious ecstasy back to primitive reproductive impulses, arguing that human spiritual passion and sexual desire spring from the same biological root.