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9,354 public-domain books, summarised. Page 191 of 195.

Travels in Arabia
Bayard Taylor
A rigorous compilation of historical expeditions reveals the inner sanctuary of the Arabian peninsula, mapping its unforgiving topography, isolated oases, and fiercely guarded political regimes.

A book of European statistics
Leo Markun
Numerical snapshots capture a continent suspended between the devastation of a global conflict and the quiet build-up toward another. Tables of wheat, warships, and telephone wires reveal the architecture of interwar Europe.

Anna of the Five Towns
Arnold Bennett
In a bleak industrial corner of Staffordshire, a young woman's sudden, massive inheritance exposes the suffocating weight of domestic tyranny, religious hypocrisy, and provincial expectation.

Bird Neighbors: An Introductory Acquaintance with One Hundred and Fifty Birds Commonly Found in the Gardens, Meadows, and Woods About Our Homes
Neltje Blanchan
A gentle, accessible guide to local birdwatching invites everyday readers to turn casual outdoor walks into lively visits with familiar winged neighbors.

Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery: A Manual of Cheap and Wholesome Diet
A. G. (Arthur Gay) Payne
A dining room table set with elegance and care can transform modest plant ingredients into a deeply satisfying feast.

Cedric, the Forester
Bernard Gay Marshall
Two young men, one a nobleman and the other a lowborn archer, forge an unbreakable bond across a divided thirteenth-century England to fight for justice, true knightliness, and the liberty of common folk.

Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century
W. H. Davenport (William Henry Davenport) Adams
Fierce alpine storms, treacherous African rivers, and the icy seas of the Far North could not deter a remarkable series of nineteenth-century women from shattering Victorian conventions to chart the unknown world.

Einstein, the searcher
Alexander Moszkowski
An extraordinary mind turns its gaze upon the universe, reshaping our fundamental concepts of space, time, and physical reality through quiet reflection and mathematical rigor.

History of Chemistry, Volume 1 (of 2): From the earliest time to the middle of the nineteenth century
T. E. (Thomas Edward) Thorpe
Human curiosity transforms practical crafts into a rigorous search for fundamental truths, turning ancient metalworking, secret alchemical recipes, and mystical guesswork into a disciplined science that systematically uncovers the hidden laws of matter.

Household Papers and Stories
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A warm, shrewd study of mid-nineteenth-century American domestic life reveals that true home-making relies far more on thoughtful taste and human kindness than on costly display.

Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
An expansive map of poetic and prose works traces a lifelong commitment to capturing the spirit of a nation, its people, and the human soul.

Poems
Matthew Arnold
A quiet, searching mind surveys classical myths, modern heartbreaks, and the industrial rush of the nineteenth century, seeking a calm center in a world that has lost its moorings.

Robin Hood
Paul Creswick
An arched yew bow, a misplaced arrow, and an unjust Sheriff drive a Saxon youth into the shadow of Sherwood Forest to forge an unbeatable fellowship of outlaws.

The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
T. (Tobias) Smollett
A high-minded Yorkshire baronet dons a suit of armor to right the wrongs of eighteenth-century England, setting off a trail of comic mishaps, romantic longing, and sharp social observations.

The Antiquity of Man
Lyell, Charles, Sir
Deep within river gravels and dark cavern floors, chipped flints sit beside the bones of long-extinct beasts, quietly dismantling traditional timelines and extending the human story into a vast, unmapped geological past.

The Boy's Voice: A Book of Practical Information on The Training of Boys' Voices For Church Choirs, &c
J. Spencer (John Spencer) Curwen
A methodical survey of Victorian choral practice reveals how delicate juvenile voices were trained to fill vast ecclesiastical spaces without strain or ruin.

The International Magazine, Volume 4, No. 5, December 1851
Various
Mid-nineteenth-century global thought, high-stakes fiction, and cultural reportage collide in an expansive periodical issue that captures a world rapidly transforming through political upheaval and artistic debate.

The Oxford Reformers: John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More
Frederic Seebohm
Three brilliant minds gather at the turn of the sixteenth century to challenge religious dogmatism, re-examine sacred texts, and envision a society built upon reason and shared humanity.

The Scarecrow of Oz
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A whirlpool swallows a little girl and a peg-legged sailor, plunging them into subterranean caverns where only an extraordinary flying creature can lift them back to the light.

The Siberian Overland Route from Peking to Petersburg,: Through the Deserts and Steppes of Mongolia, Tartary, &c
Alexander Michie
Across five thousand miles of frozen steppes, desert wastes, and muddy riverways, a Victorian merchant turns a brutal four-month journey into a sharp, remarkably modern study of imperial expansion.

The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, Assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
A quest for forgotten love leads a tin monarch and his quirky companions across wild territories, where magical perils tested their resolve and revealed that time moves on even in a land without death.

Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè
Giovanni Duprè
A sickly boy abandoned in an empty workshop grows up to challenge Europe's artistic elite through sheer stubborn honesty, carving a life where religious faith and direct observation of nature overcome professional jealousy and academic dogma.

Tom Brown at Rugby
Thomas Hughes
A spirited boy leaves his rustic home for Rugby School, where he must navigate brutal hazing, fierce athletics, and his own reckless impulses to discover what it truly means to be a man of character.

Vie de Bohème: A Patch of Romantic Paris
Orlo Williams
Youthful enthusiasm, when severed from purpose, decays into disillusionment or dissolves into pure hedonism.

Violets and Other Tales
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
An intricate tapestry of nineteenth-century life, this collection weaves together poignant fiction, reflective prose, and quiet verse to capture the fragile, fleeting moments of human connection.

Actions and reactions
Rudyard Kipling
A wounded American tycoon finds healing in an old English manor, while across the world, airships brave arctic gales and a hive of bees collapses under a strange delusion.

Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River
Joseph Conrad
Driven by dreams of European wealth that rot alongside his decaying river mansion, a Dutch trader in Borneo unravels as his Malay-English daughter chooses her mother’s heritage over his grand ambitions.

Chats on autographs
Alexander Meyrick Broadley
An affection for handwritten history and a shrewd collector's eye transform preserved letters into living encounters with the past.

Darwinism (1889): An exposition of the theory of natural selection, with some of its applications
Alfred Russel Wallace
A seminal co-discoverer of evolution mounts a robust defense of natural selection, demonstrating how life diversifies through survival and adaptation.

Delight and power in speech : A universal dramatic reader
George Wharton James
Clear human speech is an essential, universal art that transforms spoken words into genuine emotional connection, personal mastery, and lasting civic power.

Early Days in North Queensland
Edward Palmer
Across dry mud plains, rocky ranges, and dense thickets of peabush, early pastoralists pushed into the vast, uncharted interior of tropical Australia to carve out a sprawling cattle empire from the raw wilderness.

Elementary Theosophy
L. W. (Louis William) Rogers
Amid world-shattering war and religious doubt, a rational framework promises to reconcile scientific evolution with immortal spirit, mapping human destiny across subtle planes and repeated lives.

In Byways of Scottish History
Louis A. Barbé
Forging paths into forgotten history, this collection reveals the human side of royal drama and forgotten feuds behind Scotland's historical narrative.

Ireland under the Tudors, with a Succinct Account of the Earlier History. Vol. 1 (of 3)
Richard Bagwell
Centuries of misaligned law, divided authority, and violent conquest leave Ireland fractured long before the Tudor monarchs attempt to pull it under total crown control.

Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible?
Isaac Allen
A rigorous textual dismantling of the pro-slavery biblical argument reveals how scripture, properly translated and contextualized, systematically rejects chattelism in favor of human dignity and universal liberty.

Perfumes and their preparation : Containing complete directions for making handkerchief perfumes, smelling-salts, sachets, fumigating pastils
George William Askinson
Crafting commercial scents requires moving past guesswork to ground the art of perfumery in rigorous chemistry and systematic physical extraction.

Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume II, Arkansas Narratives, Part 6
United States. Work Projects Administration
A remarkably immediate set of voices emerges from these interview pages, recording the memories of elderly Black Americans who lived through the final days of slavery, the Civil War, and the long decades that followed. Recorded in the late 1930s in Arkansas, these testimonies capture lives shaped by forced labor,…

Spinning-Wheel Stories
Louisa May Alcott
A snowbound family gathers around a whirring spinning wheel during winter vacation to hear fireside tales of brave children, historic struggles, and quiet everyday triumphs.

The Arte of English Poesie
George Puttenham
A detailed guide to craft and courtly decorum, this Tudor handbook shapes the vernacular tongue into an instrument of royal service, persuasive rhetoric, and geometric artistry.

The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, 1396-1427
Johannes Schiltberger
Captured as a youth on a medieval battlefield, a Bavarian soldier endures thirty years of captivity, wandering as a servant across the vast domains of Turkish sultans, Tatar warlords, and Egyptian monarchs.

The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a Great Masonic Guild
Leader Scott
A continuous lineage of master masons spans the centuries between Rome’s fall and the Italian Renaissance.

The Chignecto Isthmus and Its First Settlers
Howard Trueman
A narrow, marshy strip of land links New Brunswick to Nova Scotia, holding the quiet history of a continent's reshaping. Howard Trueman gathers the paper trails and oral memories of this borderland, creating a meticulous, affectionate portrait of its first British and Yorkshire settlers.

The Crystal Crypt
Philip K. Dick
A passenger ship flees Mars on the eve of war, carrying three covert operatives who have stolen an entire alien city and shrunk it into a glass paperweight.

The Guardian Angel
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Bound by the dark shadow of her lineage, a spirited young woman must escape the spiritual and emotional traps set by local schemers to secure her own sanity and freedom.

The History of Lumsden's Horse: A Complete Record of the Corps from Its Formation to Its Disbandment
Unknown
They volunteered from the tea and indigo plantations of British India, trading a quiet life of sport and commerce for the dust, rain, and cold of the South African veldt.

The Patient Observer and His Friends
Simeon Strunsky
Comfortably at home in the bustling chatter of early twentieth-century New York, an understated urban guide offers a wry, genial tour through the quiet absurdities of everyday life.

The Stark Munro Letters: Being series of twelve letters written by J. Stark Munro, M.B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during the years 1881-1884
Arthur Conan Doyle
A young British physician struggles through poverty, professional betrayal, and profound crisis of faith while attempting to establish his independent medical practice.

The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay: With an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island (1789)
Arthur Phillip
Setting sail across uncharted oceans to plant a colony at the edge of the known world, an eighteenth-century naval expedition transforms raw untamed wilderness into the precarious beginnings of a new society.