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32,123 public-domain books, summarised. Page 480 of 670.

The Fourth Estate, vol. 1
Armando Palacio Valdés
A quiet Spanish coastal town erupts into absurdity when local ambitions and romantic betrayals collide, turning the mundane rhythms of provincial life into a theater of high-stakes farce.

The Frame Up
Richard Harding Davis
The truth is rarely as simple as a confession, and in the high-stakes game of New York politics, the most dangerous lies are the ones wrapped in a grain of fact. A principled public servant finds himself walking into an elaborate trap, where his own reputation becomes the primary currency for blackmail.

The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A Set of Parish Sermons
Charles Kingsley
Faith in the living God is not a stagnant tradition, but a dynamic, unfolding education that begins in the earliest chapters of scripture and finds its ultimate expression in the life of Christ.

The Great White North: The story of polar exploration from the earliest times to the discovery of the pole
Helen S. (Helen Saunders) Wright
The history of polar exploration is a chronicle of unrelenting struggle against the elements, where human ambition meets the absolute indifference of the frozen North. This record captures that immense, perilous journey from early maritime efforts to the threshold of the pole.

The Guinea Stamp: A Tale of Modern Glasgow
Annie S. Swan
A young woman’s journey from the shadows of a harsh, industrial Glasgow childhood to the refined halls of the wealthy reveals the enduring truth that human worth is measured by character, not by social standing.

The Independence of Claire
Vaizey, George de Horne, Mrs.
Faced with the duty of supporting her mother, a spirited young woman chooses the path of professional independence. Yet, in the bustling classrooms of London, she finds that life and love offer challenges no textbook can solve.

The Jester of St. Timothy's
Arthur Stanwood Pier
The arrival of a young master at a venerable boarding school sparks a quiet war of nerves and wits, revealing that growth is often the most difficult lesson of all.

The K-Factor
Harry Harrison
The fate of an entire world rests on a single, impossible calculation. When the math of social stability tips into the red, one man must decide if humanity can be saved by a scientist’s hand or only by a soldier’s trigger.

The Life or Legend of Gaudama, the Buddha of the Burmese (Volume II)
Paul Ambroise Bigandet
A quiet narrative of spiritual impermanence, Bishop Bigandet’s account follows the final days, death, and enduring legacy of the founder of Buddhism through a distinctly Burmese lens.

The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) Volume III
Theophilus Cibber
This collection of biographies chronicles the lives and literary output of forty English and Irish poets, spanning the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It offers a window into the professional struggles, social entanglements, and artistic reputations of figures ranging from the celebrated John Dryden to…

The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor
Wallace Irwin
A street-car conductor finds his muse in the jarring, rattling environment of a Sixth Avenue trolley, capturing the dizzying rush of falling in love through the slang-heavy cadence of the city. This collection of sonnets serves as a rhythmic, irreverent diary of a working-class romantic navigating the daily grind…

The Madonna of the Future
Henry James
An artist living in Florence clings to the hope of creating a singular, perfect masterpiece, but he finds himself trapped in a life of endless preparation, unable to bridge the distance between his ideals and his work.

The Maids Tragedy
John Fletcher
A soldier returns to a kingdom corrupted by its monarch, only to find his own sister sacrificed to the King’s insatiable lust. This high-stakes drama explores the collision of private honor with the public demands of loyalty.

The Mothers Of Honoré: From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899
Mary Hartwell Catherwood
A young man and a girl, both burdened by the erratic romantic lives of their elders, find their own long-standing friendship tested by the looming pressure of marriage and the sudden, distant call of the Spanish-American War.

The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 100, April, 1875: A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers
Various
This archival magazine captures the Victorian ideal of childhood through a curated collection of moralizing fables, nature observations, and gentle lessons for the youngest readers of 1875.

The Ordeal: A Mountain Romance of Tennessee
Charles Egbert Craddock
The mountains of Tennessee hold secrets of grief, crime, and long-buried affection, forcing a mother to confront the limits of her own resolve. A lost child becomes the center of a quiet, desperate struggle against an unforgiving wilderness.

The Rose-Jar
Thomas S. (Thomas Samuel) Jones
Memories are like pressed flowers, fragile and haunting, kept within the quiet chambers of the heart long after the gardens they bloomed in have vanished into the grey distance of time.

The Shipwreck: A Story for the Young
Joseph Spillman
A young boy’s forced voyage into danger becomes a test of faith and redemption when his ship is destroyed, leaving the survivors to face the perils of the sea and the transformation of their own souls.

The Son of Clemenceau, A Novel of Modern Love and Life
Alexandre Dumas
A brilliant inventor finds his life’s work and his marriage compromised by the dangerous appetites of those who wish to exploit his genius.

The Squire's Daughter
Silas K. (Silas Kitto) Hocking
A young man’s refusal to open a gate for a haughty rider sparks a clash of wills that bridges the divide between a struggling tenant farmer and the landed gentry. This story of social friction and forbidden affection explores the human cost of rigid class hierarchies in rural England.

The Stampeder
Samuel Alexander White
A man of immense strength and unshakable will confronts the brutal frozen wilderness, seeking redemption for a tarnished past and the truth behind the shadows that hunt him.

The Story of a Life
J. Breckenridge (John Breckenridge) Ellis
A portrait of devotion and industry, this chronicle follows two educators as they build a legacy of Christian learning across continents and decades.

The Sufism of the Rubáiyát, or, the Secret of the Great Paradox
Omar Khayyam
The pursuit of the divine is not an outward journey to a distant heaven, but an inward awakening to the eternal truth vibrating within the human heart.

The Tin Box, and What it Contained
Alger, Horatio, Jr.
Harry Gilbert is a hardworking, principled youth who finds that honesty is not just a moral virtue, but a shield against the schemes of the wealthy and corrupt. This classic tale follows the fortunes of an impoverished boy whose life is upended by the arrival of a wealthy, unsympathetic relative and a series of…

The Trail Horde
Charles Alden Seltzer
The vast, untamed ranges of the frontier serve as a brutal testing ground where a man’s strength of character is the only currency that holds any value. Through a landscape of shifting loyalties and bitter vendettas, a principled cattleman battles corrupt interests to secure his future and protect those he loves.

The Trail of the Sword, Complete
Gilbert Parker
A young French nobleman and a New England officer clash across colonial borders, bound by a shared love for the same woman and an unyielding commitment to their competing nations.

The Trouvelot astronomical drawings manual
E. L. (Etienne Leopold) Trouvelot
This work serves as a foundational bridge between the raw, often chaotic data of nineteenth-century observational astronomy and the public’s desire to visualize the hidden architecture of the heavens. It stands as a testament to the era’s intersection of rigorous scientific inquiry and the artistic endeavor to…

The Writing of News: A Handbook with Chapters on Newspaper Correspondence and Copy Reading
Charles G. (Charles Griffith) Ross
This handbook acts as a foundational guide for aspiring reporters, stripping away the pretenses of "fine writing" to reveal the functional, muscular prose required to report the day's events with clarity and efficiency.

Through Nature to God
John Fiske
Evolutionary science does not strip the universe of its spiritual meaning, but rather provides the necessary framework to understand our innate drive toward moral growth and the divine.

Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung
Appleton, Victor, II
The quest to recover a lost space probe leads into the dangerous depths of the ocean. Armed with high-tech ingenuity and a loyal team, a young inventor faces off against international saboteurs in a race to claim secret data.

Topsy-Turvy Land: Arabia Pictured for Children
Samuel Marinus Zwemer
This journey through the Arabian Peninsula offers a glimpse into a world of desert sands, ancient traditions, and a culture that seemed, to the author’s eyes, entirely upside down.

Two Little Confederates
Thomas Nelson Page
Two boys navigate the encroaching chaos of the Civil War from the sanctuary of their Virginia plantation, discovering that conflict transforms childhood games into grim realities. Their story offers a intimate, unsettling look at a domestic world unraveling as the lines between play and peril dissolve.

Venezuela, an economic report: Presented by students of the School of Foreign Service, as an aid to the foreign trade of the United States
Georgetown University. School of Foreign Service
This academic compilation serves as a primary snapshot of Venezuela’s early twentieth-century commercial landscape, authored by students seeking to strengthen economic ties between their host nation and the United States.

Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi
William C. Everhart
This handbook chronicles the strategic maneuvers and grueling 47-day siege that secured the Mississippi River for the Union. It offers a precise account of the military campaign that fundamentally shifted the momentum of the American Civil War.

Zen Buddhism, and Its Relation to Art
Arthur Waley
Zen Buddhism, and Its Relation to Art serves as an essential, scholarly bridge for Western readers to understand a tradition long shrouded in mystery and misinterpretation. By examining original Chinese texts, it demystifies the historical foundations, philosophical core, and aesthetic legacy of a sect often…

A-B-C of Vegetable Gardening
Eben E. (Eben Eugene) Rexford
Gardening is not a mysterious talent reserved for the expert, but a straightforward, rewarding pursuit open to anyone with a bit of ground and the inclination to put it to work.

A Brief Bible History: A Survey of the Old and New Testaments
J. Gresham (John Gresham) Machen
This work serves as a foundational roadmap through the biblical narrative, tracing the development of divine purpose from the ancient patriarchs to the final visions of the apostolic age.

A Daughter of the Dons: A Story of New Mexico Today
William MacLeod Raine
A confident American enters a land of fading Spanish traditions, triggering a clash of wills that tests the boundaries of honor, law, and love.

A journey to Central Africa
Bayard Taylor
This travelogue chronicles a mid-19th-century expedition through Egypt and the Sudan, capturing the sensory intensity of the Nile and the stark, demanding beauty of the Nubian Desert. It is a work of observation, balancing personal fatigue against the thrill of traversing territories rarely visited by outsiders of…

A Knight of the Nets
Amelia E. Barr
In a remote Scottish fishing village, the lives of a steadfast fisherman and his sister unfold against the backdrop of a tragic, star-crossed romance. This story captures the clash between traditional communal values and the isolating allure of wealth.

A Modern Zoroastrian
S. (Samuel) Laing
The universe functions as a grand, balanced mechanism of opposing forces, where the physical laws governing atoms mirror the moral struggles of humanity. By reconciling modern science with ancient wisdom, one finds a path toward clarity and purpose.

A Philadelphia Lawyer in the London Courts
Thomas Leaming
A foreign legal system reveals itself through the lived experience of a visitor walking the halls of London’s ancient courts. This account captures the specialized, often ritualized world of the English barrister, offering an American perspective on the mechanics of justice abroad.

A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients
Edward Tyson
A medical investigator cuts through centuries of myth to prove that the fabled Pygmies of antiquity were not a lost race of tiny men, but rather misidentified primates.

A Practical Illustration of "Woman's Right to Labor": A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia
Marie E. (Marie Elizabeth) Zakrzewska
A pioneering female physician recounts her arduous journey from Prussian hospital halls to the nascent medical scene of nineteenth-century America, proving that a woman’s right to labor is a fundamental necessity, not a privilege.

A Romance of the Republic
Lydia Maria Child
The struggle for freedom and identity collides with the harsh legal realities of a divided nation, tracing the lives of two sisters caught in the machinery of an unforgiving society.

A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike
Charles King
Amidst the chaos of the 1894 Pullman Strike, a soldier and a working girl must navigate the rigid barriers of class and the dangerous machinations of a self-serving agitator.

A Treatise on the Art of Dancing
Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
This eighteenth-century manifesto argues that dancing is not merely a divertissement, but a sophisticated art of expression that relies on the principles of nature and the cultivation of grace.

Across the Cameroons: A Story of War and Adventure
Charles Gilson
This adventure follows two boys from an English country estate into the heart of the Cameroons during the First World War, where they pursue a stolen artifact of immense, ancient power. It is a classic tale of colonial-era derring-do, defined by its relentless pace, high stakes, and the stark moral contrasts of a…