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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 585 of 714.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893
Various
A lively slice of Victorian satirical journalism captures a week in late-nineteenth-century London, skewering political posturing, theatrical melodrama, and fashionable social anxieties with sharp comic verse and theatrical parodies.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914
Various
A collection of satire, light verse, and cultural commentary captures the anxiety and absurdity of Edwardian Britain just months before global war.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 101, August 8, 1891
Various
A sharp, affectionate mirror held up to Victorian society, this single issue captures late-nineteenth-century London in all its noisy, opinionated, and absurd glory.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892
Various
A satirical glance at late-Victorian society reveals a world obsessed with public spectacles, political anxieties, and the absurdities of daily life.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, December 26, 1917
Various
A biting, affectionate portrait of a nation finding humor in the darkest days of the First World War.

Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870
Various
A sharp, irreverent window into Gilded Age America, this satirical weekly skewers everything from Wall Street greed to city smells with unflagging 1870 energy.

Religious Poems
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Faith does not banish grief; it offers a quiet sanctuary where sorrow and hope learn to speak the same language.

Reminiscences of a Pioneer
Thompson, William, Colonel
A frontier memoir built of black powder, winter moss, and blunt recall, this volume leaves the Oregon trail behind to map the hard cost of settling the Pacific Northwest.

Report on the Migration of Birds in the Spring and Autumn of 1884. Sixth Report: (Vol. II No. 1)
J. A. (John Alexander) Harvie-Brown
A network of coastal lookouts transforms British and Irish lighthouses into data gatherers, tracking millions of birds moving through dark skies and ocean winds.

Samuel the Seeker
Upton Sinclair
Seekers read the Word for themselves and follow where it leads, unmindful of the path’s destination.

Sargent
T. Martin Wood
An perceptive, unflattering study of modern life emerges when an artist chooses to paint society without illusion or romantic deceit.

Seven Wives and Seven Prisons
L. A. Abbott
A restless nineteenth-century itinerant travels the American Northeast, repeatedly entering hasty marriages, escaping furious in-laws, and enduring grim prison sentences before securing a quiet country life.

Sinn Fein: An Illumination
P. S. (Patrick Sarsfield) O'Hegarty
A nation does not lose its identity through military defeat alone, but when it surrenders its language, its culture, and its internal reliance for foreign legislative favors.

Sixty Years a Bookman, With Other Recollections and Reflections
Joseph Shaylor
A life shaped by the quiet rhythm of pages, presses, and trade sales yields an affectionate portrait of Victorian and Edwardian print culture.

Slavery: What it was, what it has done, what it intends to do: Speech of Hon. Cydnor B. Tompkins, of Ohio
Cydnor Bailey Tompkins
Confronting the aggressive expansion of the slave power, an Ohio congressman marshals the foundational ideals of the American Revolution to defend free soil.

Songs for a Little House
Christopher Morley
Domestic life on a quiet suburban street becomes a quiet sanctuary, offering warm shelter while world events rumble across the horizon.

Stories of Old Kentucky
Purcell, Martha C. Grassham, Mrs.
Centuries of wilderness struggle, ingenious survival, and civic achievement transform a rugged frontier into a cornerstone of American history.

Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs.: With Laughable Colored Engravings
Unknown
An adventurous mouse and a succession of fashion-conscious pigs learn through bitter experience that ignoring maternal wisdom and leaving home leads directly to disaster.

Tell Me a Story
Mrs. Molesworth
Children need to hear that their ordinary feelings matter, and that even the small choices they make in the shadow of everyday life have real weight.

The art of angling
Barker, Thomas, active 1651
Mastering the running stream requires patience, fine tackle, and an understanding of the sun's angle. This seventeenth-century guide presents a complete blueprint for tricking river fish and turning the morning's catch into a feast.

The Blue Germ
Maurice Nicoll
A secret medical experiment promises humanity total freedom from disease and death, only to reveal that physical immortality strips life of passion, releases terrible societal hatreds, and brings civilization to a sudden, silent standstill.

The Boys of 1812 and Other Naval Heroes
James Russell Soley
Iron, salt spray, and wood smoke fill the air in a chronicle of early American seamanship, tracing how a young nation forged its place upon the ocean.

The Bride of Dreams
Frederik van Eeden
In a quiet Dutch town, an aging man looks back across a lifetime torn between high spiritual longings and the wild, instinctual forces of human desire.

The British Campaign in France and Flanders, 1915
Arthur Conan Doyle
An avalanche of high explosives, poison gas, and mud descends upon the British Army along the Western Front in 1915, transforming warfare into a devastating test of sheer human endurance.

The Bungalow Boys in the Great Northwest
John Henry Goldfrap
A leap from a slippery river rock into the dark, a trapped party facing a sealed cave with four ounces of explosive, and a ring of sea-going outlaws on the Pacific coast make this a fast-moving adventure of rescue, capture, and survival.

The Carlovingian Coins
Eugène Sue
A vast, bloody empire meets the quiet resilience of a Breton farm.

The chocolate-plant (Theobroma cacao) and its products
Anonymous
A single tropical seed traveled from ancient American hearths to modern European dining rooms, transforming from a bitter ritual broth into an essential global commodity.

The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path
Donald Ferguson
A gang of high school boys navigates local rivalries, mysterious nocturnal encounters near an abandoned quarry, and the rigorous demands of cross-country running as they prepare for a high-stakes county athletic tournament.

The Curiosities and Law of Wills
John Proffatt
Behind the dry mechanics of estate planning lies a long history of human eccentricities, spiritual anxieties, and judicial hair-splitting over final wishes.

The Curse of Kehama, Volume 1 (of 2)
Robert Southey
A tyrannical king gains absolute power over heaven and earth, but his total victory is derailed when his terrible curse gives a grieving victim the unique power to defy him.

The development of British landscape painting in water-colours
A. J. (Alexander Joseph) Finberg
Across two centuries of changing tastes and techniques, British artists turned liquid pigment and light paper into an enduring, expressive vision of the natural world.

The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated, Purgatory, Volume 2
Dante Alighieri
A living traveler mounts a steep, sacred slope where suffering transforms the human soul through discipline, memory, and grace.

The Dull Miss Archinard
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
A quiet life of quiet duty gives way to a tangled web of duty and devotion. When love arrives unbidden, self-sacrifice becomes a dark corner from which only absolute honesty can rescue the soul.

The economic position of women
Academy of Political Science in the City of New York
Stripped of industrial machinery, home life separates from factory labor, forcing women to navigate low wages, physical exhaustion, and systemic inequality.

The English Husbandman (The Second Booke)
Gervase Markham
Every soil holds a secret capacity for profit if managed with keen observation, seasonal discipline, and steady human labor.

The Father and Daughter: A Tale, in Prose
Amelia Opie
Driven by a lover's false promises, a young woman abandons her home, only to learn that her desertion has shattered her father’s mind and exposed her child to absolute isolation.

The "Goldfish": Being the Confessions af a Successful Man
Arthur Cheney Train
Wealth isolates its owners behind a glass barrier, creating an illusion of life while severing genuine human connection.

The history of the condition of women, in various ages and nations (vol. 2 of 2)
Lydia Maria Child
Across centuries and continents, the legal, spiritual, and social status of women has shifted between reverence, severe subjugation, and gradual emancipation.

The House of Baltazar
William John Locke
A brilliant, headstrong scholar leaves everything behind, only to find that the world he abandoned refuses to remain forgotten.

The Kiltartan Poetry Book
Lady Gregory
A quiet revolution slumbers in these pages, where ancient Irish sagas, local laments, and country folk-songs find a shared, luminous voice.

The Last Million: How They Invaded France—and England
Ian Hay
An affectionate slice-of-life tribute to the American Expeditionary Forces, this narrative traces green recruits from Atlantic transport decks through wartime Britain and France straight to the ecstatic silence of the Armistice.

The Last of Their Race
Annie S. Swan
The Last of Their Race captures the quiet dignity of a declining Scottish dynasty as two siblings confront the end of their ancestral home.

The Man In The High-Water Boots
Francis Hopkinson Smith
With broad-shouldered vigor and a reckless open-top motor ride through Normandy, a group of friends seeks out an outdoor painter who literally stands chest-deep in running water to capture the landscape.

The Mentor: Venice, the Island City, Vol. 1, Num. 27, Serial No. 27
Dwight L. (Dwight Lathrop) Elmendorf
A sunken cluster of mudflats rises into an enchanted marble metropolis, where silent stone thoroughfares yield entirely to liquid highways.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 13, No. 353, January 24, 1829
Various
A lively miscellany captures the architectural, literary, and social curiousness of Regency-era Britain. This 1829 periodical paints a sharp, entertaining portrait of everyday life, romantic poetry, and quirky cultural history.

The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 14, No. 401, November 28, 1829
Various
A cheap penny weekly from late Georgian London opens a window onto a world obsessed with weird anatomy, Imperial expansion, and the quirky habits of statesmen.

The Nature Faker
Richard Harding Davis
A wealthy idealist buys three vaudeville bears to liberate them on his estate, only to discover that wild nature cannot easily undo a lifetime of show business.

The Net
Rex Beach
A cowardly act in a sunlit Italian garden sets off an international hunt for revenge that ends in the bloody streets of nineteenth-century New Orleans.