The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 109
6,138 public-domain books, summarised. Page 109 of 128.
Manual of Surgery Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition
Alexis Thomson
A classic Scottish textbook offers a rigorous, clear-eyed journey through the physical mechanics of tissue trauma, infection, and surgical repair.
Memoirs of Madame la Marquise de Montespan
Madame de Montespan
An intimate, razor-sharp view of Sun King-era Versailles through the eyes of the royal mistress who ruled its inner circle with devastating wit and ambition.
Pius IX. And His Time
Æneas MacDonell Dawson
A lifetime of upheaval, exile, and ideological warfare forms the canvas of this detailed account, which traces the pontificate of Pius IX through the stormy transformation of nineteenth-century European states, Papal territory, and Catholic dogma.
The Cathedrals of Great Britain: Their History and Architecture
P. H. (Peter Hampson) Ditchfield
Time leaves its signature on stone, recording centuries of faith, conflict, and artistic change across the British landscape. This guide uncovers the living history embedded within Great Britain’s grandest cathedral walls.
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
Lothrop Stoddard
An urgent warning sounds against the decline of global white hegemony and the swift, inevitable rise of non-white populations across the globe.
Yesterdays with Authors
James Thomas Fields
Behind the velvet curtain of nineteenth-century literature sat an American publisher who became an intimate friend to the greatest writers of his day. Through preserved letters, vivid travel memories, and quiet fireside exchanges, this remarkable volume offers an unvarnished, affectionate portrait of literary…
An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs
Sylvanus Griswold Morley
Before the Spanish conquest, Maya scribes created a complex calendrical graphic system, recording vast cycles of time in intricate stone glyphs and painted bark manuscripts.
Archaic England
Harold Bayley
A ancient world re-emerges from underfoot, where earthworks, place-names, and folk memory preserve the forgotten roots of British civilization.
Dress design
Talbot Hughes
A practical survey of British costume across the centuries, this handbook bridges historical evolution and workshop craft to reveal how cut, material, and decoration form the true foundations of design.
Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living
Henry T. Finck
A sharp-eyed treatise argues that national health and table pleasure depend entirely on flavor, exposing how modern processing ruins food while championing slow eating, proper cooking, and government food purity standards.
Plays
Susan Glaspell
This pioneer collection captures modern American drama breaking away from standard theatrical formulas to explore the quiet, radical shifts within human hearts.
The History of Rome, Book IV: The Revolution
Theodor Mommsen
A sweeping nineteenth-century investigation into the fall of the Roman Republic uncovers how structural decay, party violence, and military ambition systematically dismantled an empire’s democratic institutions from within.
The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald
Deep beneath a royal country home, an underground race of grotesquely missedhapen goblins plots to kidnap a little princess, setting off an enchanting battle between subterranean darkness and the steady, luminous power of faith.
English and American tool builders
Joseph Wickham Roe
Before the modern engine could turn a single wheel, mechanics had to build the tools that built the engines. This history reveals the forgotten intellects who carved precision out of raw iron, laying the bedrock of modern industry.
The 1997 CIA World Factbook
United States. Central Intelligence Agency
An exhaustive global survey maps the physical geography, political structures, social demographics, and economic engines of every territory across the planet at a pivotal late-twentieth-century historical juncture.
The Story of Siegfried
James Baldwin
Before mortal history was recorded, ancient storytellers wove the mysteries of nature and human destiny into a grand tapestry of gods, dragons, and doomed heroes.
Indian Myth and Legend
Donald A. (Donald Alexander) Mackenzie
A sweeping synthesis of sacred lore and heroic epic tracks the evolving spiritual imagination of ancient India.
The Journal to Stella
Jonathan Swift
A private journal sent across the Irish Sea becomes the ultimate backstage pass to Queen Anne’s court, where raw ambition, political backstabbing, and tender affection collide.
U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1962 July - December
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
This catalog serves as an essential historical record of literary and academic works that maintained their protection under United States law during the mid-twentieth century. It functions as a formal, bureaucratic register of intellectual property renewal for the latter half of 1962.
An Essay on Laughter: Its Forms, Its Causes, Its Development and Its Value
James Sully
A physical tremor, a sudden release of tension, or a sharp mental pivot can instantly transform our quiet moments into outbursts of sudden, uncontrollable delight.
Elements of the Theory and Practice of Chymistry, 5th ed
Pierre Joseph Macquer
A rigorous systematic survey shows how experimental observation replaces blind alchemy to establish the true laws governing chemical combination, transformation, and analysis.
His Masterpiece
Émile Zola
An ambitious painter sacrifices his sanity, his family, and his life on the altar of an unreachable artistic vision in nineteenth-century Paris.
History of Gujarát: Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Volume I, Part I
James M. Campbell
A regional chronicle of sweeping depth, this exhaustive survey traces the shifting frontiers, ruling houses, and maritime fortunes of western India from antiquity to the twilight of the Mughal Empire.
Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study
Arthur Ransome
A writer’s art cannot be cleanly separated from the theatre of his self-creation, nor can his finest achievements be understood without assessing his grandest failures.
Poems
William Ernest Henley
A soul forging resilience through physical pain, loss, and urban grit learns to embrace life’s fierce beauty before surrendering calmly to the inevitable dark.
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People
Evelyn Underhill
A deliberate shifting of attention from life’s surface chatter unlocks a direct, living union with Reality, transforming ordinary human action into an instrument of eternal creative love.
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A violent head injury strips an English lord of his civilized identity, plunging him back into the feral brute he once was while plunderers and beasts tear apart his African estate.
Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations
Budge, E. A. Wallis (Ernest Alfred Wallis), Sir
Ancient Egyptian scribes carved their deepest anxieties and highest hopes into stone, creating a mythic universe where gods aged, serpents bit the sun, and magic alone sustained the cosmic order.
Letters on England
Voltaire
An observant French traveler turns a sharp, appreciative eye upon the religious, political, scientific, and literary institutions of eighteenth-century Britain.
The Cosmic Computer
H. Beam Piper
A abandoned war-world pinpoints its future on a legendary, all-knowing supercomputer that its returning son knows is only a myth.
Tolstoy on art
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
A radical challenge to modern aesthetics argues that true art is not a luxury or a source of pleasure, but an essential conduit of human empathy and spiritual connection.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Benvenuto Cellini
A life driven by violent passion and artistic genius unfolds in a world where popes, kings, and rivals are met with equal fury.
The Translations of Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography
Chauncey Brewster Tinker
A single Old English epic passes through centuries of foreign hands, each generation bending its verse to fit the tastes and tools of its own day.
Voyage of H.M.S. 'Pandora'
Edward Edwards
A high-seas chase across the South Pacific ends in a catastrophic shipwreck, forcing both captors and captured mutineers into an agonizing open-boat voyage for survival.
Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Volume 1 of 2)
Rhys, John, Sir
A field worker walks through the mist-shrouded valleys of Wales and the Isle of Man, gathering the vanishing threads of ancient myth before modern life unravels them forever.
Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
William Archer
Crafting a play requires far more than raw inspiration; it demands a rigorous, conscious mastery of form, architecture, and dramatic tension.
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One
Emily Dickinson
Solitude transforms into a boundless domain where quiet observation unlocks the hidden intensity of mortal existence.
San Francisco Relief Survey
Unknown
When fire and earthquake leveled a prosperous metropolis in a single morning, an unprecedented social experiment arose to feed, house, and rebuild a displaced population.
The Book of Humorous Verse
Unknown
A soldier in the trenches dreams of keeping a jellyfish just to listen to it breathe; a young girl tries to fly with homemade wings of leather and bellows; and an elderly woman survives poison, cold, and a broken bone purely to spite the man paying her annuity.
The Legends of the Jews
Louis Ginzberg
Ancient tales of cosmic creation, warring giant clans, and patriarchs who wrestle with angels unfold in a vast tapestry of rabbinic lore. Beyond the spare lines of the biblical text lies a hidden world of vibrant, complex folklore.
U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1970 July - December
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
This vast, meticulously ordered volume is not a narrative, but an essential ledger recording the survival of human thought, law, and imagination across a pivotal era.
An Essay on the Principle of Population
T. R. (Thomas Robert) Malthus
Human population naturally grows at a geometric rate, while the food required to sustain it expands only at an arithmetical rate, creating a perpetual imbalance that dooms humanity to recurrent hardship.
Chronicles of Avonlea
L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery
Down off the coast of Prince Edward Island, small lives quietly collide over pride, old grudges, and sudden leaps of grace, where a deferred love story can turn on a walk through a moonlit lane or a child in a hogshead.
Whirligigs
O. Henry
Human fate twists like a children's toy across crowded Manhattan streets, dusty Texas rangelands, and tropical banana ports. In these brief tales, desperate gambits and casual deceptions repeatedly backfire into unexpected redemption.
Why Worry?
George Lincoln Walton
Worry is a mental habit, not a moral failing. By applying discipline and shifting one's focus, the mind can be trained to abandon the cycle of anxious, insistent thoughts.
A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century
Henry A. (Henry Augustin) Beers
The nineteenth century did not simply inherit the past; it reimagined it, turning the medieval world into a mirror for its own deepest longings and anxieties.
Computers—the machines we think with
D. S. (Daniel Stephen) Halacy
These machines are not mere calculators but extensions of human intellect, shaping the modern world with silent, lightning-fast precision. They represent a fundamental shift in how civilization stores information, makes decisions, and conceptualizes the future.
The snow-image, and other twice-told tales
Nathaniel Hawthorne
In these haunting tales, ordinary New England life dissolves into shadow and symbol, revealing the dark, imaginative interior of the human heart.