The whole shelf
All free summaries — page 659
34,093 public-domain books, summarised. Page 659 of 711.
R. Caldecott's Picture Book (No. 2): The Three Jovial Huntsmen—Sing a Song for Sixpence—The Queen of Hearts—The Farmer's Boy
Randolph Caldecott
A vibrant collection of traditional English nursery rhymes and playful folk songs comes alive through rhythmic verse, absurdity, and countryside warmth.
Rippling Rhymes
Walt Mason
A jaunty, quick-witted look at small-town American life, where everyday frustrations and comic hypocrisies are captured in clever prose disguise.
Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp
Percy Keese Fitzhugh
A group of young scouts embarks on a summer journey by houseboat, only to become entangled in a series of strange mysteries involving a missing man, a locked locker, and a misunderstood boy from the slums.
Saved from the Sea
William Henry Giles Kingston
A midshipman's unexpected command of Arabic becomes a lifeline after a catastrophic shipwreck strands his small group of survivors on the formidable African coast.
Scientific Essays and Lectures
Charles Kingsley
This collection of essays offers a spirited defense of scientific inquiry as a moral and intellectual necessity, arguing that the study of nature is the surest path to both physical health and spiritual clarity. It serves as a bridge between the Victorian era’s rigid dogmas and the emerging, evidence-based rigor of…
Seattle Car & Foundry Company, Catalogue No. 3, December, 1913
Seattle Car and Foundry Company
In an era of industrial expansion, a Pacific Northwest manufacturer presents a comprehensive catalog of heavy-duty railcars engineered to master the rugged timberlands and steep mountain passes of the West.
Seven Xmas Eves
Unknown
A ragged London boy framed for a gent's pocket watch builds a life across ocean and empire to prove that honor outlasts the law.
Short Sketches from Oldest America
John B. (John Beach) Driggs
An ancient, isolated people tell their own story through the myths, domestic rituals, and ingenious tools that sustain life on the edge of the frozen Arctic.
Sir Francis Drake: His Voyage, 1595: Together with the Spanish account of Drake's attack on Puerto Rico
Maynarde, Thomas, active 1595
A English fleet sails west in search of Spanish treasure, only to end in total collapse and the deaths of its celebrated leaders.
Sketch of the life of Abraham Lincoln
Isaac N. Arnold
A steadfast prairie lawyer rises from backcountry poverty to guide a fractured nation through civil war, leaving a legacy written in total emancipation and tragic martyrdom.
Some Common Birds Useful to the Farmer (1915 edition)
F. E. L. (Foster Ellenborough Lascelles) Beal
Centuries of agricultural folklore meet rigorous laboratory science to settle whether wild birds are quiet farm allies or destructive crop pests.
"Some Say"
Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
A gossip-plagued minister, a quiet deaf woman, and a steadfast neighbor navigating grief each discover how small-town scrutiny shapes their domestic fates.
Southey
Edward Dowden
A boy sent to learn Latin under an irascible Welsh master grows up to champion radical ideas, write epics, and quietly anchor a literary era through sheer devotion to his craft and household.
Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration: Norwich, July 5th, 1913
James Hooper
A wandering child finds a snake in his shirt, learns secrets from roadside gypsies, and grows up to translate forgotten tongues across a changing nineteenth-century England.
Spirit Slate Writing and Kindred Phenomena
Chung Ling Soo
Behind the velvet curtains and dimly lit parlors of the nineteenth-century séance room lay no true messages from the dead, but rather a brilliant, calculated array of mechanical deceptions, chemical reactions, and theatrical misdirection.
The Abandoned Room
Wadsworth Camp
The mystery of a death in a locked room draws the living into a web of suspicion, forcing them to confront the chilling possibility that some secrets cannot stay buried.
The Adventures of M. D'Haricot
J. Storer (Joseph Storer) Clouston
A young French Royalist flees to England, where his conspiratorial ambitions crumble into an affectionate, comedy-filled immersion in British society.
The Anatomy of Bridgework
William Henry Thorpe
A cold, analytical eye examines the hidden strains, silent failures, and gradual decay that transform pristine metal spans into compromised structures over decades of real-world use.
The Arena, Volume 18, No. 93, August, 1897
Various
A fierce public debate over American social identity, corporate power, and economic reform unfolds across every page of this classic late-nineteenth-century journal.
The Argosy, Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891
Various
A varied Victorian cabinet of wonders, this issue pairs dark domestic secrets and strange powers with sunlit travels, quietly pulling the reader into the subtle anxieties of its age.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 06, April, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
A vibrant portrait of a young nation's intellectual life, where high literary craft meets the urgent, gathering storm of the American Civil War.
The Beauty Of The Village
Mary Russell Mitford
A vain young woman’s beauty draws the wrong kind of admiration, leading her down a perilous path of self-will until an unexpected calamity reshapes her life and character.
The Bee's Bayonet (a Little Honey and a Little Sting): Camouflage in Word Painting
Edwin Alfred Watrous
An earnest, eccentric artifact of First World War home-front fervor, this 1918 collection mixes fierce anti-German patriotism with light verse, domestic sketches, and biblical parodies.
The Blotting Book
E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
A young man stands accused of a brutal murder, his fate hanging on a chain of incriminating evidence that seems impossible to break. Beneath the surface of his trial, a cold, calculated deception waits to be unraveled.
The Book of Shells: Containing the Classes Mollusca, Conchifera, Cirrhipeda, Annulata, and Crustacea
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Great Britain). Committee of General Literature and Education
Beneath tide pools and deep waters lies a hidden architecture built by uncounted soft-bodied creatures, whose shells and armors reveal the surprisingly elegant mechanics of the natural world.
The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 01, No. 04, April 1895: Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy
Various
Centuries of stone carving in Southern Italy reveal a vibrant fusion of Eastern intricate surface patterns and Western massive structural forms.
The Cavaliers of Virginia, vol. 2 of 2
William Alexander Caruthers
The clash between colonial liberty and royal authority explodes across seventeenth-century Virginia, where a young leader must choose between his heart's devotion and his country's freedom.
The Comedienne
Władysław Stanisław Reymont
Running away to the theater looks like freedom, but the stage is a factory powered by human frailty. When an idealistic young woman flees her father’s provincial demands for the greasepaint of Warsaw, she discovers that artistic liberation is just another arena for exploitation.
The Eichhofs: A Romance
Bethusy-Huc, Valeska, Gräfin von
A young Prussian nobleman rejects traditional military ambitions for practical study, igniting a ripple of financial choices, domestic tensions, and romantic missteps across his ancestral estate.
The End of Time
Wallace West
Humanity falls frozen in its tracks when a mysterious paralysis destroys its sense of time, leaving only a small circle of survivors to wage a frantic, high-voltage struggle to awaken a silent world.
The Figure In The Mirage: 1905
Robert Hichens
Against a crackling campfire in the Moroccan darkness, a weary traveller learns the haunting story of a Frenchwoman whose fate is foretold by a vision riding across the desert sands.
The First 1001 Fibonacci Numbers
Unknown
A cascade of addition, where each number is the sum of its two predecessors, unfurls into a landscape of staggering, astronomical scale. This is a journey through the sheer, relentless architecture of an infinite sequence.
The Girl From His Town
Marie Van Vorst
A young American heir with millions to spend crosses the Atlantic only to discover that the purest thing money can buy is a quiet life back home with the girl who knew him before he was rich.
The Girls of St. Wode's
L. T. Meade
Behind the bright gloss of Victorian women’s higher education lies a world where high ideals constantly collision with the harsh realities of debt, deception, and family sacrifice.
The Guardians
Cox, Irving E., Jr.
A young woman's rebellion against local superstitions unleashes an unwitting biological threat upon the stars, forcing a confrontation between political complacency and scientific responsibility.
The Harlequin Opal: A Romance. Vol. 2 (of 3)
Fergus Hume
Under a blazing tropic sun, a fractured republic reels as an ambitious usurper, a sacred Aztec gem, and a trapped lover collide in a sweep of jungle, sea, and war.
The Highest Treason
Randall Garrett
A man chooses to betray his own species to save it, engineering a brutal galactic conflict to shock a complacent human race out of its lethal stagnation.
The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, Part 26
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A fading knight searches for meaning in a world that prefers his madness to his truth. His descent into a cavern’s dark history becomes the ultimate test of his fragile reality.
The house of joy
Laurence Housman
A maiden transformed into a peahen weeping over the brother she cannot bring herself to slay; a moon-child descending a beam of light to retrieve a fallen pearl; a cobbler’s apprentice using dancing magic to outwit a jealous princess. Laurence Housman’s The House of Joy is a collection of original fairy tales…
The Hybrids, An Epi-comic Satire
An M. D.
A satire on 19th-century reform conventions exposes the clash between radical agitation, political opportunism, and traditional domestic values.
The Indian operation of couching for cataract
Robert Henry Elliot
A ancient surgical technique, preserved for millennia in India, meets the relentless scrutiny of early twentieth-century pathology.
The inner house
Walter Besant
When a brilliant scientist abolishes natural death, humanity trades art, ambition, and love for a gray, uniform eternity.
The Iron Arrow Head or The Buckler Maiden: A Tale of the Northman Invasion
Eugène Sue
A bold skipper's son leaps onto a wagon load of timber to turn his boathook against an iron-clad knight, choosing standard-issue feudal brutality over obedience.
The King's Esquires
George Manville Fenn
A missing gem, a bold royal disguise, and a nocturnal flight across the Channel set two young esquires on a collision course with national destiny.
The making of a bigot
Rose Macaulay
A young idealist who loves every point of view finds that to act, to marry, and to belong in the world, he must learn the uncomfortable art of taking sides.
The Middle of Things
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
An accidental witness to a murder is thrust into a labyrinthine conspiracy involving stolen heirlooms, a missing nobleman, and a fortune-seeking criminal syndicate.
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 12, No. 325, August 2, 1828
Various
This collection of curiosities and commentary captures the restless, encyclopedic spirit of Georgian London, serving as a vibrant time capsule of 1828. It invites readers to survey a world of architectural debate, historical trivia, and scientific wonder.
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 14, No. 392, October 3, 1829
Various
This collection of miscellanies serves as a fascinating window into the intellectual appetites of 1829, offering a curated blend of historical inquiry, social satire, and scientific curiosities. It captures the rhythm of a public mind hungry for both enlightenment and diversion.