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9,354 public-domain books, summarised. Page 182 of 195.

The master mind of Mars
Edgar Rice Burroughs
A soldier from Earth finds himself an unwilling apprentice to a mad surgeon on Mars, where brains and bodies are swapped like spare parts in a grotesque, high-stakes game of survival.

The Spirit Lake Massacre
Thomas Teakle
The Spirit Lake Massacre of 1857 stands as a harrowing turning point in the settlement of the American frontier, forever altering the landscape of Iowa and the lives of those caught in the collision of cultures.

Webster & Tourneur
John Webster
The stage is a dark mirror for the corruption of the human soul, where brilliance and depravity walk hand in hand. These plays define a world where ambition, lust, and vengeance consume all they touch.

Blackthorn Farm
Arthur Applin
A young man faces ruin and a false conviction, setting off a desperate scramble for redemption across the wild moors of Dartmoor and the distant jungles of the Far East.

Caesar: A Sketch
James Anthony Froude
This historical study re-examines the life and legacy of a defining Roman figure, stripping away centuries of moralizing to reveal a pragmatic reformer navigating a collapsing republic. It is a portrait of power and its inevitable, violent costs.

Cecilia
Fanny Burney
An orphan heiress navigating the traps of London high society must reconcile the heavy demands of her inheritance with the unpredictable stirrings of her own heart. This expansive novel charts a young woman’s struggle to maintain her integrity while surrounded by spendthrifts, social climbers, and the stifling…

Finished
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
A masterful weaver of African adventure brings a long-gestating saga to its harrowing conclusion, tracing the downfall of a kingdom through the eyes of a legendary hunter. This tale of revenge and imperial collapse blends historical tragedy with the supernatural.

International Short Stories: English
Unknown
These diverse tales capture the grit, humor, and shadows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offering a window into the varied storytelling traditions of the British Isles.

Married
August Strindberg
Marriage is a fragile, often brutal experiment, where the initial intoxication of romance frequently yields to the grinding friction of social expectation, economic strain, and the slow erosion of individual identity.

Mugby Junction
Charles Dickens
A middle-aged man walks away from his orderly life, arriving at a lonely junction to find something he cannot name. This collection of linked tales captures the haunting, mechanical, and human rhythms of a changing industrial world.

New York Times Current History
Various
This collection of contemporary reports, official documents, and editorial commentary captures the immediate, fractured reality of the Great War as it unfolded in the spring and summer of 1915. It functions as a historical snapshot of a world struggling to comprehend the rapid shift toward industrialized, total…

Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England: A History
Richard Valpy French
This work traces the persistent entanglement of alcohol with English culture, examining how beverages and drinking customs shaped national life from the era of the Saxons to the nineteenth century.

Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of The Students And Teachers of the Sciences Related to Medicine During the Middle Ages
James J. (James Joseph) Walsh
These profiles of medieval medical practitioners argue that modern scientific discovery is often a rediscovery, revealing a sophisticated heritage of clinical observation and surgical skill long overlooked by history.

Overland through Asia
Thomas Wallace Knox
A journalist traverses the vast, frozen expanse of Northern Asia on a grand mission to connect the Old and New Worlds via telegraph, capturing the immense scale of the Russian Empire and its diverse cultures.

The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century
William Lyon Phelps
Poetry in the early twentieth century stands at a crossroads, caught between the echoes of Victorian grandeur and the urgent, often jarring, arrival of the modern world. This guide illuminates the transition, charting the path from established masters to the burgeoning voices of a new, fractured era.

The Anatomy of Suicide
Forbes Winslow
The desire to end one’s own life is a medical crisis, not a moral failing. A Victorian physician argues that the mind’s tragic unraveling is a phenomenon rooted in physical health and physiological disturbance.

The History of Creation, Vol. 2 (of 2): Or the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes
Ernst Haeckel
Natural forces, acting over immense spans of geological time, have sculpted the staggering variety of life on Earth from a single, primordial ancestor. This foundational work of evolutionary science traces the unbroken biological lineage connecting the simplest organisms to the complex anatomy of man.

The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 2
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The critic’s eye is a lens that brings the vast architecture of English drama into focus, revealing how genius mirrors the shifting nature of the human mind. This collection captures the essential observations of a profound thinker on the craft of his greatest predecessors.

The Pearl Story Book: Stories and Legends of Winter, Christmas, and New Year's Day
Unknown
The frost of a long-ago winter settles on every page of this collection, gathering legends, poems, and folktales that transform the cold season into a landscape of moral clarity and wonder. It is a quiet, atmospheric treasury designed to turn the darkest nights of the year into a time for reflection and storytelling.

The Rare Earths: Their Occurrence, Chemistry, and Technology
Stanley Isaac Levy
HOOK This work charts the emergence of the rare earth elements from scientific obscurity into the essential building blocks of modern industrial civilization. It captures a moment of intense transition when chemistry moved from confusion to precision.

The theory and practice of archery
Horace A. (Horace Alfred) Ford
This treatise offers a definitive look at the mechanics and discipline of archery, distilled from the expertise of a Victorian-era champion. It serves as both a manual for the aspiring marksman and a historical record of the sport’s evolution.

Welsh Fairy Tales
William Elliot Griffis
These tales emerge from a rich, ancient cultural bedrock, where the line between the natural world and the realm of myth is forever blurred by mist, music, and the shifting geography of the Welsh hills.

A Yankee doctor in paradise
S. M. (Sylvester Maxwell) Lambert
A veteran physician navigates the islands of Oceania, fighting unseen parasites while grappling with the complex collision of ancient tribal traditions and modern colonial administration.

Character Building: Being Addresses Delivered on Sunday Evenings to the Students of Tuskegee Institute
Booker T. Washington
These addresses serve as a blueprint for moral fortitude and practical self-reliance, capturing the guiding philosophy of a foundational American educator speaking to the students he helped shape.

Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
To explore this book is to walk through the corridors of a restless, brilliant mind that refuses to be categorized. It is an invitation to examine the messy, contradictory nature of being human by watching a single man examine himself.

Great Inventions and Discoveries
Willis Duff Piercy
Humanity’s rise from cave-dwelling to the mastery of the skies is marked by the relentless ingenuity of those who refused to accept the limitations of their age. This chronicle maps the evolution of the tools and discoveries that fundamentally altered the course of civilization.

Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems
Henry Hart Milman
The ancient legend of a king and his queen separated by divine malice and reunited by the strength of their devotion is a foundational tale of classical Indian literature. This translation captures the solemn, sweeping beauty of a story that has endured as a cornerstone of epic tradition.

One of Clive's Heroes: A Story of the Fight for India
Herbert Strang
The winds of fortune blow hard across the Indian subcontinent, where a young man’s courage becomes the only currency that matters in the struggle between colonial ambition and ruthless treachery.

Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
These essays map the intellectual landscape of the Victorian era, arguing that a life of quiet reflection and critical judgment is the only remedy for a society obsessed with material progress.

Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources
Unknown
These tales offer a window into the rich, supernatural tapestry of Slavonic imagination, where ordinary lives intersect with ancient, haunting forces.

Surnames as a Science
Robert Ferguson
Unlocking the hidden histories of our family names requires more than mere guessing; it demands a rigorous, scientific approach to linguistic roots. By tracing the echoes of the past, everyday surnames reveal their ancient origins.

The Apple: The Kansas Apple, the Big Red Apple
Unknown
This collection serves as both a practical guide and a historical record for cultivating the apple, celebrating the fruit as the "healthful, hearty heart of the darling dumpling.

The Art of Story-Telling
Marie L. Shedlock
Mastering the spoken word requires more than a natural gift; it demands the deliberate cultivation of one's own imagination to truly inhabit the stories shared with others.

The History of the Twenty-ninth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry: in the Late War of the Rebellion
William H. Osborne
This account documents the steady endurance of a Massachusetts infantry regiment throughout the American Civil War, tracing their path from raw volunteers to battle-hardened veterans.

The Night-Born
Jack London
This collection of short stories explores the thin, often permeable boundary between civilized restraint and the primal, predatory nature lurking within the human spirit. Through settings ranging from the high-society clubs of San Francisco to the brutal, unforgiving landscapes of the Klondike and the boxing rings…

The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales
Jean-Pierre Camus
True sanctity is not found in grand gestures, but in the quiet, persistent practice of gentleness, humility, and the disinterested love of God.

U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1956 July - December
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
This directory serves as a vital historical ledger, documenting the formal extension of legal ownership over thousands of literary and intellectual works during a pivotal six-month window in 1956.

Where Love is There God is Also
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
The shoemaker who spends his days watching the world through a street-level window finds that the divine is not found in grand gestures, but in the humble acts of service he performs for his neighbors.

A Prisoner of the Khaleefa: Twelve Years Captivity at Omdurman
Charles Neufeld
A harrowing, first-hand account of twelve years spent in the brutal Omdurman prison, this narrative serves as both a testament to human endurance and a stark, unvarnished window into the fall of the Mahdist state.

A Short History of Astronomy
Arthur Berry
To look up at the night sky is to inherit a legacy of wonder, yet the mechanics of the heavens were only unlocked through centuries of painstaking observation and mathematical intuition. This historical survey traces the slow, methodical transformation of astronomy from early conjecture to the rigorous science of…

Astounding Stories, April, 1931
Various
This periodical is a quintessential artifact of early 1930s pulp science fiction, delivering high-stakes adventures that prioritize rapid-fire action, cosmic peril, and the wonder of extraterrestrial discovery. It serves as a time capsule for an era when the boundaries of science were treated as vast, untapped…

Essays Before a Sonata
Charles Ives
These are the meditations of a visionary composer, reflecting on the profound, untamable spirit of the American Transcendentalists and the eternal struggle to translate the soul’s deepest intuitions into the fragile language of art.

Forging Ahead in Business
Alexander Hamilton Institute (U.S.)
Success in the modern era belongs to those who transcend narrow specialization by mastering the foundational principles of business. True professional advancement requires a comprehensive understanding of the entire commercial machine.

Four Months Afoot in Spain
Harry Alverson Franck
A schoolteacher trades his classroom for a thousand-mile trek across Spain, proving that a modest budget is no barrier to witnessing the soul of a nation.

General Scott
Marcus J. (Marcus Joseph) Wright
This military biography chronicles the long, distinguished career of Winfield Scott, tracing his rise from a youthful officer in the War of 1812 to his status as the venerable commander of the Union armies.

Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist
Samuel Smiles
This portrait of a humble artisan turned literary titan reveals how one man’s verse bridged the divide between the forgotten folk traditions of the French South and the cultural elite of Paris. It is a testament to the power of art to elevate the common life and serve the needs of the impoverished.

Lives of the English Poets
Samuel Johnson
A titan of eighteenth-century letters turns his sharp, discerning eye toward the architects of English verse, weighing their genius, their inconsistencies, and their moral characters with uncompromising honesty.

Memorials of Old Lincolnshire
Unknown
This collection of essays serves as a scholarly gazetteer for the traveler and antiquary, documenting the layered history of an English county through its stone, steel, and records. It captures the transition of a landscape from prehistoric iron-smelting sites to the sophisticated architectural achievements of the…