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All free summaries — page 223
13,367 public-domain books, summarised. Page 223 of 279.
A Lute of Jade
L. (Launcelot) Cranmer-Byng
A delicate bridge spanning centuries of song, these verses carry the quiet sorrows of parted lovers, the ghost-haunted ruins of fallen empires, and the serene joy of wine shared beneath a autumn moon.
A practical treatise on the manufacture of perfumery
C. (Carl) Deite
Through rigorous chemistry, historical study, and tested laboratory formulas, late nineteenth-century cosmetic art transforms raw botanical extracts into refined commercial perfumery.
A preface to morals
Walter Lippmann
When the ancient scaffolding of faith collapses, modern individuals face the daunting task of governing their own desires. This incisive critique outlines how to build a mature, self-directed life amid the fragments of broken authority.
A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe on Rivers and Lakes of Europe
John MacGregor
Alone in a custom-built oak and cedar canoe, a Victorian traveler glides along the rivers, lakes, and canals of Western Europe. Every turn of the water brings quiet solitary reflection, swirling rapids, or sudden crowds of astonished onlookers.
Arabian Wisdom: Selections and Translations from the Arabic
John Wortabet
A single word from a wise man carries the weight of a lifetime of experience. This collection brings together centuries of Arabic moral philosophy, offering timeless guidance on character, speech, and human nature.
Auguste Rodin: The Man - His Ideas - His Works
Camille Mauclair
A painstaking critical study strips away academic convention to reveal how a self-taught, impoverished French master revolutionized modern sculpture by returning directly to nature, geometrical balance, and the emotional truth of living forms.
Biographies of distinguished scientific men. First series
F. (François) Arago
Through personal peril, political upheaval, and rigorous observation, a pioneering French astronomer illuminates the human drama behind scientific discovery, revealing that the march of knowledge relies as much on personal character as on mathematical genius.
Children of the Dawn
E. F. (Elsie Finnimore) Buckley
A single choice can ripple outward to shatter kingdoms or bind lovers across the boundaries of death and heaven.
China collecting in America
Alice Morse Earle
A pioneer of American material culture retraces early domestic life through the porcelain, pewter, and pottery that survived in rural attics, old taverns, and coastal homesteads.
Common poisonous plants of New England
Youngken, Heber W., Jr. (Heber Wilkinson)
Bright berries, roadside weeds, and familiar garden flowers carry hidden chemical defenses that can swiftly turn fatal to curious children and unwary foragers across New England.
De La Salle Fifth Reader
Christian Brothers
A carefully curated collection of prose, poetry, and moral instruction guides readers through foundational lessons in literature, faith, and civic duty.
Flag and Fleet: How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas
William Wood
Through centuries of storm and battle, the freedom of the global oceans has been bought and preserved by the unrelenting vigil of British sea-power.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850
Various
An eclectic snapshot of mid-nineteenth-century thought, this periodical captures a world rapidly transforming through industrial labor, scientific observation, revolutionary politics, and literary genius.
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates: Fiction, Fact & Fancy Concerning the Buccaneers & Marooners of the Spanish Main
Howard Pyle
A grim, authentic portrait of the Golden Age of Piracy, where real-world greed and sudden violence strip the romance from the high seas.
India for Indians: Enlarged Edition
Chitta Ranjan Das
A passionate plea for Indian self-determination, this collection of speeches exposes the injustice of colonial rule and calls for unified national action.
L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas
John Milton
Light and shadow balance each other across the landscape of human thought, tracing a passage from the joyous warmth of dawn to the quiet depth of midnight.
Letters from an American Farmer
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
A peaceful farmer finds his idyllic rural life shattered when war forces him to abandon everything he has built.
Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman
Sarah Grimké
To reduce a human mind to a decorative ornament or a legal dependency is to corrupt both the creature and the sacred design of her existence.
Maid Marian
Thomas Love Peacock
A fugitive wedding, a besieged castle, and a forest democracy bound by wine and archers turn the Robin Hood legend into a witty celebration of freedom.
Myths and Dreams
Edward Clodd
Before logic or dogma refined human thought, the earliest explanations of existence grew from the immediate evidence of nighttime visions and natural terrors. Primitive minds forged the foundation of modern belief simply by taking their sensations seriously.
Philippine Mats: Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1
Philippines. Bureau of Education
Woven throughout the archipelago, Philippine mats transform local palm, pandan, and sedge fibers into vital household necessities and enduring expressions of practical art.
Scarabs
Percy E. (Percy Edward) Newberry
An in-depth exploration of ancient Egyptian scarabs, seals, and signet rings, offering insights into their historical significance, uses, and artistic techniques.
Si Klegg, Book 3: Si and Shorty Meet Mr. Rosenbaum, the Spy, Who Relates His Adventures
John McElroy
When two Indiana infantrymen encounter a shadowy spy network in Civil War Tennessee, ordinary picket duty turns into a chaotic gauntlet of backwoods rogues, high-stakes gambling, and unexpected courtships.
Submarine U93
Charles Gilson
A orphaned British teenager in New York longs to fight for his homeland, only to fall into the crosshairs of a ruthless espionage network operating on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Age of Big Business: A Chronicle of the Captains of Industry
Burton Jesse Hendrick
From the ashes of the Civil War rose an industrial empire, forged by ambitious men who remade a nation of scattered farms into a single high-tech titan.
The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales: Including Stories by Feodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky, Jörgen Wilhelm
Various
Darkness, obsession, and fatal errors bind these European tales, where a single miscalculation or buried secret drives men and women toward inevitable ruin.
The Devil's Garden
W. B. (William Babington) Maxwell
An ordinary man’s conscience becomes a devastating battleground when a hidden act of violence unravels his moral sanity.
The Lodger
Marie Belloc Lowndes
A desperate, impoverished London couple unknowingly rent their spare rooms to a eccentric gentleman who matches the profile of a terrifying serial killer.
The Niagara River
Archer Butler Hulbert
A natural conduit carved by glacial retreats becomes the focal point where ancient wilderness, geopolitical conflict, and modern industrial ambitions collide.
The Quest for a Lost Race
Thomas Edward Pickett
A forgotten nineteenth-century theory of origins leads a Kentucky physician on a historical hunting expedition, tracing the physical strength and spirit of his fellow Kentuckians back to Scandinavian and Norman roots.
The Story of Baden-Powell: 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps'
Harold Begbie
A buoyant Victorian youth grows into a fearless officer whose boundless humor, keen observation, and resourceful leadership transform him into an iconic military hero during the siege of Mafeking. <Image alt="Portrait of Robert Baden-Powell" caption="Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell"…
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904
Various
A world of Edwardian wonder unfolds in a legendary magazine where brilliant detectives, world-famous actresses, and magical golden birds share space with sea captains and strange hidden valleys.
The Weavers: a tale of England and Egypt of fifty years ago - Complete
Gilbert Parker
A young English Quaker takes his vision of righteousness to the court of Cairo, where his unyielding idealism collides with imperial intrigue, hidden bloodlines, and a world where every mercy has its price.
The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale
Lady (Sydney) Morgan
An banished nobleman wanders the wild western coast of Ireland, only to fall under the enchanting spell of a fallen prince’s daughter.
Voyages of Samuel De Champlain
Samuel de Champlain
Driven by commercial ambition, royal diplomacy, and raw geographic curiosity, a French cartographer treks through the icy rivers and dense forests of eastern North America, charting a wilderness that refuses to yield easily.
A Book of Quaker Saints
L. V. (Lucy Violet) Hodgkin
Ordinary men and women, driven by an inner light, transform cruelty into peaceful redemption across centuries of quiet, revolutionary faith.
A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 12
Robert Dodsley
A collection of seventeenth-century English plays reveals a dramatic landscape where rapacious greed, romantic deception, and ancient warfare meet.
A Tour Through South America
A. S. (Archibald Stevenson) Forrest
An expansive, vivid trek across a continent on the cusp of modern industrial transformation, capturing wild landscapes, ruined empires, and bustling frontier societies.
Atlantic Classics, Second Series
Unknown
The everyday observation of an era becomes the enduring wisdom of the next when caught by reflective minds. These collected voices from early twentieth-century America turn personal experience into quiet philosophy.
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See
Percy Addleshaw
Rising above ancient stone walls, a majestic monument of faith and genius reveals how centuries of ambitious prelates transformed raw Devonshire masonry into a single, breathtaking masterpiece of Decorated Gothic architecture.
Big Game Shooting, volume 2 (of 2)
Clive Phillipps-Wolley
Tracking a phantom beast through dense pine ravines demands absolute stillness, deep patience, and an appetite for cold terrain.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
Various
A lively mix of intellectual critique, historic narrative, high romance, and social satire gives voice to nineteenth-century British literary culture.
Castilian Days
John Hay
A nineteenth-century American diplomat paints a vivid, clear-eyed portrait of Spain, where ancient traditions, glorious art, and stubborn pride collide with the dawn of modern politics.
Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines: With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909
Miguel Saderra Masó
A precise, tabulated inventory of seismic disasters tracks centuries of ground-shattering events, detailing how structural ambition and tectonic vulnerability shaped the physical history of the Pacific islands.
Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady
Samuel Richardson
A young woman seeks to preserve her moral independence against an overbearing family and a relentless, scheming suitor.
Dante and the early astronomers
M. A. (Mary Acworth) Orr
Before modern observatories shattered the ancient skies, human beings measured time by shadow poles and mapped their cosmos in fixed nested spheres. To understand how Dante Alighieri wove this early cosmos into poetry, an astronomer turns her gaze back to the origins of stargazing.
Despoilers of the Golden Empire
Randall Garrett
A ruthless commander leads a starveling expedition into an alien jungle, risking everything to wrench the universe's most precious power metal from a fierce, sun-worshipping empire.
Drake's Road Book of the Grand Junction Railway: from Birmingham to Liverpool and Manchester
Drake, James, active 1825
A journey through the heart of early industrial Britain shows how steam, steel, and speed reshaped a nation's landscape and daily life.