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34,239 public-domain books, summarised. Page 305 of 714.

Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia
Giovanni Battista Belzoni
A towering Italian circus strongman travels to 19th-century Egypt, pitilessly battling desert sands, Turkish intrigue, and relentless rivals to exhume the lost treasures of the Pharaohs.

Natural history of intellect, and other papers
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A mind detached from personal anxiety can observe the universe with absolute clarity, finding that human thought and external nature are driven by the exact same underlying laws.

No Thoroughfare
Charles Dickens
A dark, winding Victorian mystery moves from the foggy sanctuaries of London's foundling hospitals to the lethal, snow-bound mountain passes of the Swiss Alps, driven by stolen identities, corporate betrayal, and an obsessed killer.

North, South and Over the Sea
M. E. Francis
Across three distinct rural landscapes, ordinary men and women navigate the silent pressures of poverty, pride, and local tradition to secure their places in the world.

Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody
Andrew Lang
What if the most beloved characters in English literature crossed paths across book covers to swap gossip, trade insults, and settle old scores?

Our Little Cossack Cousin in Siberia
Fedor Alexis Postnikov
Living along the wild Amur River, a young boy grows up amid frontier dangers, traditional duties, and the proud military customs of a Cossack settlement.

Pictures of German Life in the XVth, XVIth, and XVIIth Centuries, Vol. I
Gustav Freytag
Centuries of division and conflict forged a nation's soul, leaving its ordinary people to build a society from the ashes of feudalism, war, and religious schism.

Pluck on the Long Trail
Edwin L. (Edwin Legrand) Sabin
A group of Boy Scouts must trek across the rugged Rocky Mountain wilderness to deliver an urgent message while outsmarting rival boys, poachers, and natural disasters.

Poems of childhood
Eugene Field
A quiet, enduring sweetness fills this collection of verse, where the fleeting magic of early childhood meets the tender ache of adult remembrance.

Pyrotechnics: The History and Art of Firework Making
Alan St. H. (Alan St. Hill) Brock
A streak of fire cuts across a dark sky, splitting into bright stars that drift down over a roaring crowd. Long before fireworks became spectacles of light and color, they were noisy weapons of war and fragile alchemy.

Queer people
Basil Thomson
An insider’s view of war, deceit, and civil unrest reveals the fragile mechanics that keep a nation standing.

Renée Mauperin
Edmond de Goncourt
A spirited young woman's impetuous act of revenge against her brother's social climbing sets off a tragic chain of events that shatters her family.

Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of Travel
Gertrude Lowthian Bell
An open, sunlit landscape, ringed by barren mountains and empty of water, holds the quiet simplicity of a place where history has already swept past.

Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals: In Two Volumes, Volume I
Samuel Finley Breese Morse
A gifted young painter sets sail for the studios of Europe, unaware that his true masterpiece will be forged in copper wire and electrical currents rather than canvas and oil.

Sandwiches
S. T. Rorer
A single square of bread transforms into an unexpected medium of domestic architecture when guided by precise early-twentieth-century culinary craft.

Scientific American Supplement, No. 288, July 9, 1881
Various
A striking index of late-nineteenth-century ingenuity reveals how Victorian minds sought to harness hidden energies, from the molecular chemistry of brewing to the vast mechanical forces powering industrial civilization.

Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons: Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben
Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot
Trapped behind enemy lines at the outbreak of the First World War, an ordinary civilian must use his wits to survive brutal camps, harsh solitary confinement, and systematic starvation.

Strife: A Drama in Three Acts
John Galsworthy
Two uncompromising leaders, one representing capital and the other labor, drag a Welsh tinplate community through a brutal winter strike only to watch their followers force a compromise that leaves both men utterly broken.

Ten Months in the Field with the Boers
Anonymous
A French volunteer joins the Boer cause in late 1899, only to watch internal divisions and tactical rigidity unravel their initial military successes against the British Empire.

The Adventures of a Grain of Dust
Hallam Hawksworth
A tiny speck of earth narrates the grand, slow churn of planetary mechanics, revealing how mountain-shattering frosts, industrious earthworms, and ancient sea-monsters conspire to build the very soil beneath our feet.

The Art of Kissing: Curiously, Historically, Humorously, Poetically Considered
Will Rossiter
An electric charge, a dangerous physical squeeze, or a holy duty—history cannot decide what a kiss is, but this book insists on gathering every single attempt to define it.

The Breitmann Ballads
Charles Godfrey Leland
A boisterous, beer-soaked comic epic that follows an unbeatable German-American wanderer through civil wars, political backrooms, high-society parlors, and European taverns.

The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A life defined by the pursuit of emotional truth reveals how memory, passion, and conscience shape a man's inner world.

The Drama of the Forests: Romance and Adventure
Arthur Heming
A winter in the Canadian north unfolds through the eyes of an artist who travels into the deep wilderness alongside an Ojibwa chief and his family.

The Eye of Istar: A Romance of the Land of No Return
William Le Queux
Across the sun-scorched sands of North Africa, a marked Dervish soldier risks death, captivity, and impossible terrain to unravel a ancient, dark secret stamped onto his own skin.

The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 13
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Delusion meets devotion as a foolish knight mistakes a simple inn for a fortress, while an inner tale of misplaced trust shatters a quiet Italian home.

The Jesus Problem: A Restatement of the Myth Theory
J. M. (John Mackinnon) Robertson
A rigorous inquiry into religious history reveals how ancient rituals, sacrificial customs, and mythological archetypes gradually converged to construct the foundational narratives of the early Christian faith.

The Lenape Stone
Henry C. Mercer
A tiny slate gorget plowed out of a Pennsylvania farm field sparks a furious nineteenth-century debate over whether ancient North American hunters fought the hairy mammoth.

The Mary Frances knitting and crocheting book
Jane Eayre Fryer
When young Mary Frances discovers that her sewing bag is alive with chatty yarn and opinionated tools, she is swept into a secret sequence of craft lessons disguised as imaginative play.

The Men of the Nineties
Bernard Muddiman
This survey traces the delicate, doomed artistic rebellion that swept through 1890s London, charting how a small band of young writers and illustrators briefly remade British culture in the image of French decadence.

The party battles of the Jackson period
Claude G. (Claude Gernade) Bowers
American democracy in the Thirties is forged not in quiet halls of consensus, but in the white-hot crucible of partisan fury.

The Patriot (Piccolo Mondo Antico)
Antonio Fogazzaro
A high-minded young aristocrat defies his autocratic grandmother to marry the lower-class woman he loves, setting off a quiet domestic war against a backdrop of foreign occupation.

The Red Book of Heroes
Mrs. Lang
Duty and devotion demand a cost that the world rarely understands.

The Scholemaster
Roger Ascham
A bitter debate over educational discipline in Tudor England yields a revolution in how languages are taught.

The works of Mr. Thomas Brown, serious and comical : in prose and verse, with his remains in four volumes compleat
Thomas Brown
A chaotic, brilliant underworld of letters and dialogues reveals an Augustan London where dead poets, disgraced kings, and scheming brothel-keepers bicker across eternity with equal parts filth, wit, and cynical common sense.

The works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 02 (of 32)
John Wesley
True religion begins within the human spirit, yet its genuine internal awakening inevitably demands a radically altered life of tangible charity, self-denial, and active devotion in an unspiritual world.

Three Men and a Maid
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
An ocean voyage, a misplaced love letter, and a houseful of confused romantic rivals turn a quiet English country home into a theater of utter chaos.

U.S. Marine Operations in Korea, 1950-1953, Volume 4 (of 5): The East-Central Front
Lynn Montross
In the frozen mountains of Korea, Marines transformed military doctrine, testing armored vests and helicopter assaults while fighting through an agonizing stalemate.

Vikings of the Pacific: The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward
Agnes C. Laut
Courage, desperation, and greed drive an array of global adventurers across the uncharted Pacific to claim the riches of North America's western edge.

Voodoo Planet
Andre Norton
A Terran space trader steps into a high-stakes duel of minds on a lush safari world where psychological witchcraft threatens to unravel planetary order.

Willing to Die: A Novel
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
A young woman isolated in an old Welsh estate finds her quiet life shattered by sudden tragedy, romantic betrayal, and the dark secrets of a predatory gentleman.

Youth and Egolatry
Pío Baroja
A sharp, unembellished self-portrait reveals a mind at war with societal dogmas, institutional authority, and its own restless nature.

A Baptist Abroad: Travels and Adventures of Europe and all Bible Lands
Walter Andrew Whittle
An American traveler crosses oceans and continents with a Bible in one hand and a walking stick in the other, observing the world with sharp-eyed practical humor and devout Protestant faith.

A Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 4
Unknown
A sinister uncle plots against a helpless orphan, shipwrecked lovers wash ashore, and corrupt lords exploit the poor in this vivid, four-play gallery of Jacobean drama.

A Household Book of English Poetry: Selected and Arranged with Notes
Unknown
An expansive journey through centuries of verse maps the evolution of human devotion, grief, and triumph. It offers a curated haven where timeless voices measure the shifting tides of mortal experience.

A Man for the Ages: A Story of the Builders of Democracy
Irving Bacheller
A pioneer family travels west by covered wagon, carving out a home in the Illinois wilderness alongside a tall, awkward young clerk named Abe Lincoln.

A naturalist in Madagascar: A record of observation, experiences, and impressions made during a period of over fifty years' intimate association with the natives and study of the animal & vegetable life of the island
James Sibree
Across dense high-canopy rain forests and sprawling highland plains, a veteran English observer charts fifty years of forgotten tracks, wild lemurs, and local Malagasy customs.

A Romance of Youth
François Coppée
A quiet boy’s gentle heart meets the crushing realities of loss, artistic ambition, and unrequited love in nineteenth-century Paris.