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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 23 of 714.

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences
René Descartes
To think clearly is to dismantle the architecture of received wisdom, brick by brick, until only the unshakeable foundation remains. This journey demands nothing less than the total reconstruction of one’s own mind.

Humorous Ghost Stories
Dorothy Scarborough
When the veil between the living and the dead wears thin, it is not always a chilling hand that reaches through—sometimes, it is a comedian in a sheet.

Homer's Odyssey: A Commentary
Denton Jaques Snider
A singular, rigorous map of the ancient world’s most famous journey, revealing how Homer’s architecture of gods and men reflects the eternal struggle between human agency and divine decree.

The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921
Various
Scholars and witnesses reconstruct a hidden history, challenging the distortions of their era to provide a rigorous, evidence-based account of the African American experience across centuries and continents.

Mearing Stones: Leaves from My Note-Book on Tramp in Donegal
Joseph Campbell
The road offers a singular promise: to those willing to walk it, the landscape reveals not just its stones and heather, but the ancient, quiet pulse of a people living in harmony with the earth.

The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
The world is vast, wild, and indifferent to our comfort, yet within the quiet corners of a riverbank, there exists a profound, unspoken pact of friendship that makes the struggle of existence bearable.

Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A Family Record
William Austen-Leigh
A quiet life lived in the corners of a country rectory reveals the hidden machinery behind some of the most celebrated novels in the English language. This family record offers an intimate, unadorned look at a literary life defined by devotion, domesticity, and a sharp, observant wit.

The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2: Commander in Chief of the American Forces During the War
John Marshall
A young soldier faces the harsh realities of the frontier, eventually leading a fragile, disorganized army through the crucible of a revolutionary war against the greatest power on earth.

The art of money getting
P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum
Wealth is a machine that anyone can learn to operate, provided they master the discipline of keeping more than they spend. True independence, however, requires a steady brain and the wisdom to know when to hold your ground.

Mansfield Park
Jane Austen
A quiet girl, displaced from her family to live with wealthy, indifferent relatives, learns that the greatest test of character is not grand gestures, but the steadfast quiet of doing what is right.

Crooked Trails and Straight
William MacLeod Raine
A dusty road holds more than one path for a man looking to make amends, and in the high desert, the difference between a life of crime and a life of grace is often just a matter of who you stand beside.

Reels and Spindles: A Story of Mill Life
Evelyn Raymond
A young girl discovers that character is the only currency that matters when her family’s life of refinement collapses into the demanding, soot-stained reality of a textile mill.

Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima
A. Hilliard (Andrew Hilliard) Atteridge
The history of naval warfare is a succession of desperate gambles on the open water, where the fate of empires often hinges on the turning of a single tide.

Olive: A Novel
Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
A life measured not by the symmetry of one’s face, but by the steady, unyielding light of a character forged in seclusion and tempered by the complex shadows of a family’s hidden past.

The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality
Rudolf Schmid
How can modern scientific inquiry coexist with the ancient foundations of human faith? This exploration examines the tensions of the nineteenth century, seeking a bridge between the findings of biology and the truths of the soul.

The best short stories of 1917, and the yearbook of the American short story
Unknown
A snapshot of a nation in flux, these stories capture the quiet desperation and sudden revelations of lives caught between the old world and the uncertainty of a new age.

The conspirators
Alexandre Dumas
A young aristocrat stakes his life on a desperate political gamble, only to find that his fate is entwined with a quiet, unsuspecting copyist and the woman he loves.

A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II
Augustus De Morgan
A curious archive of scientific obsession, this collection examines the persistent, often humorous, and always human struggle to solve the unsolvable.

The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I
Jules Lermina
A shadow of the legendary Count of Monte-Cristo looms over a new generation, where the sins of long-buried villains resurface to test the courage of their children and the mettle of a mysterious protector.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz
L. Frank (Lyman Frank) Baum
When the earth splits open, home is the last thing you will find at the bottom of the crack.

The Adventures of Maya the Bee
Waldemar Bonsels
Maya is born into a world of rigid order, but she is a creature of curiosity and spirit, refusing to be defined by the dark, claustrophobic hive. She longs to see the sunlight and discover the secrets of the vast, blooming world outside.

Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson
Life is not a machine assembling itself from spare parts, but an erupting fountain of creative change that constantly defies the static predictions of science.

Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter
Lawrence L. Lynch
A young woman, haunted by a past she cannot escape, returns to the home of her childhood nemesis to dismantle his life with the cold, calculated precision of a master detective.

Odd Numbers: Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe
Sewell Ford
The city is a puzzle, but Shorty McCabe knows where the pieces fit.

The Diamond Coterie
Lawrence L. Lynch
A cold, calculated robbery leaves a wealthy heiress under suspicion, while a dark family secret threatens to destroy everyone she loves. In this tangled web of high-society crime, the truth is the most dangerous possession of all.

Happy Days
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
The world is rarely as grand or as tragic as we imagine it, and in these lighthearted sketches, even the smallest daily friction becomes a reason to smile.

When Life Was Young: At the Old Farm in Maine
C. A. (Charles Asbury) Stephens
The world of a boy is a romance still unread, where every field holds a secret and the rhythm of the seasons dictates the true measure of a life well lived.

Impressions of America During the Years 1833, 1834 and 1835. Volume 2 (of 2)
Tyrone Power
A traveler’s keen eye captures the rhythm of a young, restless nation, mapping the vast landscapes and social currents of a continent finding its own defiant voice.

A Sailor of King George
Hoffman, Frederick, Captain
A career spent chasing fortune across the waves, only to be met by yellow fever, shipwrecks, and the iron grip of a French prison. This is the unvarnished account of life on the front lines of the Napoleonic Wars.

Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons
John McElroy
The silence of the dead often speaks louder than the proclamations of the living, and this account brings the forgotten voices of an American tragedy into the light of day.

George at the Fort
Harry Castlemon
The frontier is a place where a boy’s past can be buried in the dust, but where character is eventually dragged into the light by the harsh demands of survival and duty.

Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
George W. M. (George William MacArthur) Reynolds
A cursed man stalks the forest in the skin of a beast, while a silent, vengeful noblewoman plots to dismantle her own family’s legacy. This is a tale of dark bargains, hidden motives, and the heavy price of blood.

Pygmalion
Bernard Shaw
A flower girl learns to speak like a lady, but discovers that transforming one’s voice is far easier than changing one’s soul or the rigid class boundaries of a city.

The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03
Unknown
The Roman Empire does not fall in a day, but through centuries of shifting frontiers, religious fervor, and the relentless rise of those it once called barbarians.

Macbeth
William Shakespeare
When the shadows of ambition stretch across a weary man’s path, the choice to seize a crown or hold to honor determines everything that follows.

The Book-Hunter: A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author
John Hill Burton
The true bibliophile does not merely own books; he enters into a lifelong, often obsessive, and deeply curious dialogue with the printed word. To hunt for a volume is to hunt for a piece of the world itself.

The Goose Man
Jakob Wassermann
A man of fierce, uncompromising genius and a world that demands he trade his soul for comfort: this is the story of a spirit in constant, abrasive conflict with the banality of his surroundings.

Socialism: A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles
John Spargo
A rigorous, measured guide to an economic theory often misunderstood, this work separates the cold mechanics of industrial production from the impassioned dreams of those who seek to redefine the social order.

Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage
B. G. (Benjamin Grant) Jefferis
Knowledge is the ultimate safety, providing a guiding light through the physical and moral pitfalls that threaten the health and character of the individual.

The Children's Garland from the Best Poets
Unknown
A ferryman encounters a mischievous, winged boy who cannot see, while elsewhere, a mouse pleads for its life and a sailor attempts a desperate, solitary voyage home. These are the quiet, often haunting echoes of a world captured in verse.

Colleges in America
John Marshall Barker
Higher education in America, once a fragile experiment, has become the bedrock of national progress and moral leadership. This exploration traces how a scattered network of colonial schools blossomed into the vast, influential university system of the nineteenth century.

The Yacht Club
Oliver Optic
The wind is rising on Penobscot Bay, and a young man’s reputation is caught in the squall. Between the building of swift yachts and the sting of false accusations, true character finds its way home.

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume
To understand the world, we must first accept that our most certain beliefs are not products of logic, but habits of the mind—instincts evolved to help us survive in an uncertain universe.

Manures and the principles of manuring
Charles Morton Aikman
The soil is not a passive vessel but a living, chemical engine, and its capacity to sustain life depends entirely on the hidden, systematic replenishment of the elements we so often take for granted.

The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1 (of 2)
William James
The mind is not a static vessel, but a restless, surging stream; discover how your own consciousness constructs the world and defines the persistent "I" that travels through it.

The Border Watch: A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand
Joseph A. (Joseph Alexander) Altsheler
The wilderness offers no mercy to those who hesitate, and for these scouts, survival depends on a keen eye, a silent tread, and the courage to face an enemy that outnumbers them ten to one.

They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration
Mary Antin
The light of the Statue of Liberty still burns, yet some fear the shadows of those who seek her flame. This is a call to return to the original promise of a nation built on universal ideals.

A Treatise on Domestic Economy
Catharine Esther Beecher
In an era of shifting frontiers and rapid social change, one woman sets out to codify the domestic sphere as the vital, intellectual bedrock of a functioning democracy.