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7,238 public-domain books, summarised. Page 148 of 151.

History of the Scottish Regiments in the British Army
Archibald K. Murray
From the early mercenary bands serving European crowns to the mid-nineteenth-century lines in the Crimea and India, Scotsmen built a formidable military legacy. Major Archibald K. Murray traces this long martial lineage across two dozen regiment histories.

Pen Drawing: An Illustrated Treatise
Charles Donagh Maginnis
A skilled stroke can turn simple black ink on white paper into light, texture, and physical depth.

The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan
James Justinian Morier
A penniless barber's son navigates nineteenth-century Persia through sheer opportunism, shifting seamlessly between victim and rogue across a lifetime of bizarre misadventures.

The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton
A quietly lethal collection exposes the polite cruelties of high society, tracing how money, ego, and intellectual posturing dismantle human relationships.

The Germ: Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art
Various
An obscure Victorian periodical becomes a battleground for young artists rebelling against academic tradition and demanding an uncompromising, soulful return to nature.

The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Queen Anne
William Makepeace Thackeray
A proud, orphaned boy grows up in a great house, yields his birthright to shield his family, serves Queen Anne on European battlefields, and pursues a dazzling, unreachable woman until age and exile reveal where true devotion lies.

The life of Cardinal Mezzofanti: With an introductory memoir of eminent linguists, ancient and modern
Charles William Russell
A poor carpenter's son in Bologna eavesdrops on a neighborhood Latin school through an open window and discovers a prodigy’s ear. He grows up to master dozens of world languages without ever setting foot outside Italy.

The Little Lame Prince
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A abandoned royal child rides an enchanted cloak through the skies, discovering that his fragile limbs cannot restrict the vast, transformative power of a generous heart.

What Maisie Knew
Henry James
A young girl becomes a human shuttlecock in the bitter court battles of her self-absorbed, divorcing parents, gradually developing a sharp, quiet awareness of the adult corruption surrounding her.

Heortology
K. A. Heinrich (Karl Adam Heinrich) Kellner
An indispensable record of liturgical evolution, tracing how scattered local devotions transformed into a synchronized global calendar.

Is Shakespeare Dead?: From My Autobiography
Mark Twain
A skeptical, funny, and deeply personal attack on the literary establishment asks how a man who left no books or letters could possibly have written the greatest plays in the English language.

Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History
Auguste Sabatier
Humanity finds itself trapped in a tragic internal conflict between the strict determinism of modern science and the moral freedom demanded by conscience. Deliverance comes neither through sheer intellect nor blind authority, but through a vital, historically grounded faith.

Pedagogical Anthropology
Maria Montessori
To build a better society, we must look beyond abstract theories of education and ground our schools in the biological reality of the developing child.

Sex: Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English
Henry Stanton
Breaking the silence surrounding human reproduction, this earnest guide frames sexual education as a vital necessity for personal health, moral stability, and social harmony.

Sixes and Sevens
O. Henry
A roving minstrel shoots his host’s rival, a cowboy mistakes a rat for his girl, and a Broadway rogue steals a Southern major’s identity.

The Black Monk, and Other Stories
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
A scholar’s fatal hallucination, an exhausted nursemaid’s dark impulse, and a doctor trapped in his own asylum showcase human vulnerability at its absolute threshold.

The pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria
of Alexandria Hero
An ancient treatise opens a window into an era where steam, air pressure, and water were harnessed to create wondrous mechanical marvels and automated temple illusions.

The Principles of Chemistry, Volume II
Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev
A monumental nineteenth-century journey through the architectural order of matter, mapping the chemical elements by atomic weight and unmasking the hidden laws governing the universe.

The Standard Operaglass: Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas
Charles Annesley
Behind every curtain rests a world built on passion, deception, and fateful choices, waiting for a guide to unlock its secrets.

The Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories
Algernon Blackwood
A man stands alone at a ship’s rail, watching a low, treeless shore rise from the mist. What he seeks is the quiet safety of home, but what waits in the silence is an ancient, watchful fear.

The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes, Volume 05: Miscellaneous Pieces
Samuel Johnson
A giant of eighteenth-century letters turns his formidable mind to dictionaries, Shakespeare, political satire, and legal theory, demonstrating how rigorous critical thinking transforms everyday prose into enduring literature.

Travels through France and Italy
T. (Tobias) Smollett
A sharp-eyed Scottish doctor journeys through mid-eighteenth-century France and Italy, recording the indignities of travel alongside the enduring wonders of classic architecture.

William Morris: Poet, Craftsman, Socialist
Elisabeth Luther Cary
To read this biography is to watch a force of nature hurl itself against the Victorian age, transforming books, homes, and public squares through sheer creative conviction.

A Diplomat in Japan: The inner history of the critical years in the evolution of Japan when the ports were opened and the monarchy restored, recorded by a diplomatist who took an active part in the events of the time, with an account of his personal experiences during that period
Ernest Mason Satow
An ambitious young English interpreter steps directly into the chaos of feudal Japan during the mid-nineteenth century, recording first-hand the explosive collapse of the Shôgunate and the dramatic restoration of the Mikado.

A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons: Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy
Friedrich Christian Accum
Everyday meals in nineteenth-century society carry invisible perils, as unscrupulous merchants systematically contaminate staple foods with toxic chemicals to maximize their commercial profits.

From North Pole to Equator: Studies of Wild Life and Scenes in Many Lands
Alfred Edmund Brehm
A sea-bird's screech over Northern bergs; the sudden bloom of a Siberian steppe; the silent, terrifying march of African white ants.

History of the Franks
Gregory, Bishop of Tours, Saint
Amid the wreckage of the fallen Roman Empire, bloodlines clash, cities burn, and factional chaos threatens to consume early medieval Gaul. Through it all, one bishop records the volatile birth of the Merovingian world.

James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography
James Nasmyth
From an Edinburgh childhood surrounded by artists and antique coins to the roaring foundries of Industrial Britain, a master inventor crafts the mechanical tools that shaped the modern world.

Life histories of North American shore birds, Part 2 (of 2)
Arthur Cleveland Bent
Across rocky coastlines, windswept tundra, and vast prairie marshes, wild shorebirds journey thousands of miles along fragile avian highways.

Lives of Boulton and Watt. Principally from the Original Soho Mss.: Comprising also a history of the invention and introduction of the steam engine
Samuel Smiles
A visionary industrialist and a melancholic inventor combine forces to tame the power of steam and ignite the modern world.

Narrative of the Circumnavigation of the Globe by the Austrian Frigate Novara, Volume I: (Commodore B. Von Wullerstorf-Urbair,) Undertaken by Order of the Imperial Government in the Years 1857, 1858, & 1859, Under the Immediate Auspices of His I. and R. Highness the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, Commander-In-Chief of the
Scherzer, Karl, Ritter von
A grand imperial voyage launches across distant oceans, charting forgotten currents, remote volcanic peaks, and bustling colonial ports with painstaking scientific curiosity.

Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete
Unknown
An expansive critical anthology charts the long, irregular journey of English verse from its early pre-Chaucerian shadows through the golden ages of drama, romance, and satire to the late eighteenth century.

The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877
Various
A mid-nineteenth-century Catholic miscellany weaves serialized romance, travel writing, and theology into a sweeping defense of faith, culture, and human devotion across a rapidly changing world.

The Chartreuse of Parma: Translated from the French of Stendhal (Henri Beyle)
Stendhal
An idealistic Italian nobleman stumbles through the battle of Waterloo, dives headlong into court politics, and falls in love under the shadow of a prison tower.

The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
A calm, clear-eyed witness steps onto the chaotic stage of the 1848 French Revolution, recording the collapse of a monarchy and the rise of a tumultuous republic.

The Serf
Guy Thorne
A man born to the dirt strikes back at the masters who treat his people like beasts, setting off a brutal chain of blood, sanctuary, and eventual reckoning.

The Works of the Emperor Julian, Vol. 2
Emperor of Rome Julian
Stripped of imperial posturing, these writings reveal a ruler wrestling with the gap between philosophical ideals and the messy realities of governing a divided empire.

Women of Modern France
Hugo P. (Hugo Paul) Thieme
Through detailed historic portraits, Hugo P. Thieme explores how French women cultivated social power, intellect, and personal influence to shape the political and cultural destinies of their nation.
![Cover of Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/yama-the-pit-a-novel-in-three-parts-a-i-aleksandr-ivanovich-kuprin.webp)
Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts
A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich) Kuprin
Behind the glowing facades of a provincial red-light district lies a world of routine transaction, institutionalized cruelty, and the fragile humanity of women trapped within it.

A Child's Garden of Verses
Robert Louis Stevenson
A quiet world of bedtime shadows, carpet oceans, and windowsill voyages comes vividly alive through the eyes of an imaginative child.

A Manual of Elementary Geology
Lyell, Charles, Sir
A single shell held in the hand can decode the history of an ocean, revealing how time and quiet water alter the surface of the earth.

A Source Book of Mediæval History: Documents Illustrative of European Life and Institutions from the German Invasions to the Renaissance
Unknown
A vivid tapestry of primary texts traces how European culture rebuilt itself from the ashes of Rome into the vibrant spark of the Renaissance.

Biographical Sketches of the Generals of the Continental Army of the Revolution
Mary Theresa Leiter
These pages chronicle the lives of the Continental Army’s commanders, revealing the men who steered a fragile revolution from its desperate, early volunteer days to the hard-won independence of a new nation.

Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland
Daniel Turner Holmes
Stepping onto the winter ferry, a traveler turns his gaze from the snow-covered peaks of Skye to the living stories, fierce debates, and rugged poetry scattered across the remote glens and stormy sea-lochs of northern Scotland.

Original Short Stories
Guy de Maupassant
A world of quiet desperation, sudden twists, and sharp ironies, where bourgeois domesticity masks bitter hatred and modest lives founder on small miscalculations.

The Choise of Valentines
Thomas Nash
A young man seeks his sweetheart on Valentine’s Day, only to find her in a brothel and himself in an erotic farce of exhausted stamina.

The Englishman in China During the Victorian Era, Vol. 2 (of 2): As Illustrated in the Career of Sir Rutherford Alcock, K.C.B., D.C.L., Many Years Consul and Minister in China and Japan
Alexander Michie
A delicate game of diplomacy, culture, and coercion unfolds across nineteenth-century East Asia as Western powers demand access to reluctant imperial empires.

The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier
Charles E. (Charles Eugene) Flandrau
Before Minnesota became a powerhouse of agriculture and industry, its borderlands were shaped by fierce territorial squabbles, economic gambles, and violent encounters between native inhabitants and expanding European settlers. This volume collects early historical records alongside vivid personal memoirs to trace…