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46,038 public-domain books, summarised. Page 676 of 960.

The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel
A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
A high-society masquerade ball in London turns deadly, plunging an idle gentleman and a famed French detective into a tangled web of stolen jewels, nocturnal drug use, and haunting dreams.

The Air Mystery of Isle La Motte
E. J. (Edith Janice) Craine
An aerial juvenile mystery from 1930 featuring step-brothers Jim and Bob, who use their airplane to unravel smuggling schemes and flood crises along the Vermont-Canada border.

The Art of Drinking: A Historical Sketch
Georg Gottfried Gervinus
A civilization reveals its true spirit not in its high theories, but in how its people gather to empty a glass.

The artificial man
Clare Winger Harris
A college athlete loses a leg and yields to the belief that his soul degrades alongside his flesh, driving him into a gruesome quest to replace his entire body with mechanical parts.

The Battle of Principles: A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict
Newell Dwight Hillis
This work examines the moral and political collision of the American anti-slavery struggle, tracing how a nation’s foundational principles were tested and ultimately reaffirmed through a long, violent trial.

The black cat, vol. I, no. 2, November 1895
Various
A young fugitive flees across the mountain brush, his coat soaked in warm blood while the voices of his pursuers echo through the rocks.

The Boy Aviators in Africa
John Henry Goldfrap
Two teenage brothers launch an experimental airship into the African wilderness, matching their wits and mechanical skill against ruthless speculators, deadly river currents, and armed slave-traders.

The Boy Scouts for City Improvement
Robert Shaler
In a heat-plagued New England town, a troop of Boy Scouts wields brooms and civic pride against trash, political apathy, and a rowdy gang of local bullies.

The Bramble Bush
Randall Garrett
A man gets his eyes scratched out in a bramble bush, then jumps right back in to scratch them in again.

The burning world
Algis Budrys
In a world that won the war for absolute freedom, the hardest battle turns out to be surviving the peace.

The Burton Holmes Lectures, Volume 1 (of 10): In Ten Volumes
Burton Holmes
Travelling across an empire closed off from the modern world, a nineteenth-century visual storyteller records a vanishing kingdom before civilization changes it forever.

The Coming of the Ice
Green Peyton
This story explores the harrowing trajectory of humanity through the eyes of its final survivor, an immortal man who sacrifices his capacity for love to witness the planet's slow, frozen expiration.

The Crusade of the Excelsior
Bret Harte
A marooned party of American travelers faces the strange, forgotten customs of a secluded Mexican enclave, where their survival depends on navigating both local politics and their own simmering social tensions.

The Dead Boxer: The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two
William Carleton
A young man is driven to the brink of ruin by a public humiliation, only to find his path to redemption blocked by a web of ancient family grudges and a mysterious, vengeful crone.

The Doré Bible Gallery, Volume 1
Unknown
This collection serves as a visual gateway into the grand narratives of Scripture, interpreted through the dramatic and meticulous engravings of an iconic nineteenth-century artist. It offers a meditative experience, pairing classic biblical text with evocative imagery that captures the scale and emotional weight…

The False Gods
George Horace Lorimer
A hard-boiled reporter chases the scoop of a lifetime, only to find himself trapped in a web of Egyptian relics, dark secrets, and a woman who may be more than human.

The fearsome touch of death
Robert E. (Robert Ervin) Howard
A lonely room and a single corpse turn an ordinary night watch into a horrifying psychological trap, where unreasoning dread proves far more lethal than any supernatural monster.

The Fortune Hunter
Louis Joseph Vance
The fortune-hunting scheme seems foolproof on paper, but a young man soon discovers that playing a role in a small town requires a sincerity he never intended to possess.

The Girls From Earth
Frank M. Robinson
Deep in the frontier territory of Midplanet, two rough-hewn fur trappers race against the clock to reach a muddy rocket port, desperate for their chance to draw a lottery ticket for an Earthborn bride.

The Gold of Chickaree
Susan Warner
Her sudden marriage brings no pause to her sharp-witted independence, nor does it shield her husband from the quiet, persistent demands of his own moral conscience.

The Golden House
Sarah S. (Sarah Schoonmaker) Baker
A young Italian boy finds a loving, humble home in Sweden, where his artistic soul and gentle spirit touch the lives of both impoverished neighbors and wealthy aristocrats. This heartwarming tale of belonging crosses cultural boundaries with quiet grace.

The Harlequinade: An Excursion
Dion Clayton Calthrop
A whimsical invitation to step away from the rigidity of modern life, this excursion traces the enduring journey of the Harlequinade from ancient myth to the mechanical present.

The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, Part 31
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A deluded knight and his earthy squire navigate a world of elaborate pranks, where the boundary between noble idealism and farcical reality dissolves into a series of ingenious, often stinging, social experiments.

The Justice and Necessity of Taxing the American Colonies, Demonstrated: Together with a Vindication of the Authority of Parliament
Unknown
A fiery 1766 British tract demands that the American colonies submit to imperial taxation, insisting that those protected by royal arms must pay for their own defense.

The lady's mile
M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon
High-society marriages of convenience, secret longings, and the crushing machinery of Victorian respectability collide as two very different young women navigate the glittering, mercenary world of London's fashionable elite.

The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Volume 27: Expelled from Spain
Giacomo Casanova
A weary Venetian gentleman wanders the roads of eighteenth-century Spain and Italy, fleeing his past debts, dodging jealous authorities, and finding that even an aging libertine cannot outrun the quiet onset of regret.

The Mentor: Joan of Arc, v. 3, Num. 22, Serial No. 98, January 1, 1916
Ida M. (Ida Minerva) Tarbell
An illiterate peasant girl hears divine voices in her father's garden and leads a divided nation to restore its rightful king to the throne. Captured by her enemies, she defends her faith before a hostile tribunal and dies at the stake.

The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh
Abraham Epstein
Tens of thousands of Black workers are quietly arriving in a cold, roaring steel city, trading the oppression of the rural South for high-stakes northern industrial labor.

The Prince and the Pauper, Part 8
Mark Twain
A royal heir and a London beggar trade clothes on a whim, setting off a cascading crisis of identity, law, and power. Mark Twain’s classic tale pits the fragility of royal status against the harsh realities of sixteenth-century English justice.

The Prison of the Stars
Stanley Mullen
Abandoned in deep space, a rogue adventurer must gather the most desperate convicts on a prison asteroid to hijack a supply ship, outwit an alien underground, and launch a desperate exodus to the stars.

The ritual and significance of the Winnebago medicine dance
Paul Radin
A sacred shell, a simulated death, and a long journey around the world define a ritual where life is purchased, preserved, and renewed.

The silica gel pseudomorph, and other stories
Edward Hart
A collection of whimsical tall tales, chemical oddities, historical vignettes, and small-town American romances bound together by a scientist's wry humor and affection for storytelling.

The social evolution of the Black South
W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
In a sweeping historical analysis, W. E. B. Du Bois charts the transformation of Southern Black society from the absolute monarchies of the antebellum plantation to the segregated, self-organizing urban centers of the early twentieth century.

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke
C. J. (Clarence James) Dennis
Disillusioned with his street-corner existence, a working-class Australian youth falls in love, trades his old vices for quiet domesticity, and discovers unexpected joy in fatherhood.

The Soul of Democracy: The Philosophy of the World War in Relation to Human Liberty
Edward Howard Griggs
A impassioned wartime philosopher dissects the global collapse of 1914, demanding that democratic nations look beyond military victory and remake their own educational, social, and moral ideals to secure lasting human freedom.

The southern literary messenger, Vol. I., No. 2, October, 1834
Various
Voices from the nineteenth-century American South join in a vibrant literary miscellany, weaving together moral essays, romantic fiction, hydrodynamics, and personal poetry into a singular period showcase.

The Three Sisters
May Sinclair
Trapped in a desolate, wind-swept Yorkshire village, three sisters struggle against a stifling father and the crushing weight of their own unfulfilled desires.

The training of teachers in the United States of America
Amy Blanche Bramwell
In 1893, two British educators set out across the American North-East, recording with sharp, observant clarity a nation radically reimagining how teachers were trained and children were taught.

The Troublemakers
George O. (George Oliver) Smith
An overregulated Earth forces its vibrant rebels into the stars by making conformity the law and exile the only escape.

The type-writer girl
Grant Allen
A fiercely independent young London woman takes up typewriting to earn her bread, drifting between office drudgery, a failed utopian commune, and an unexpected trial of the heart.

The Ultimate Salient
Nelson S. Bond
A man sitting in a peaceful Virginia garden receives a handwritten manuscript from the future—a chronicle detailing the collapse of human democracy and a desperate flight to the Moon. <Image alt="Vintage pulp science fiction magazine cover from Planet Stories" caption="Planet Stories Fall 1940 issue"…

The Valley of the Kings
Marmaduke William Pickthall
A naive Syrian painter gets swept up in the grand illusions of a visiting English tourist, mistaking Western patronage for true brotherhood until reality forces him home.

The victory
Molly Elliot Seawell
A Southern plantation house becomes a crucible of divided allegiances and silent yearnings as civil war tears a family apart.

The Wellfields: A novel. Vol. 1 of 3
Jessie Fothergill
In a quiet corner of Victorian fiction, financial ruin serves not merely as a plot device, but as a crucible for human integrity.

The White Sister
F. Marion (Francis Marion) Crawford
A profound struggle between earthly love and religious devotion, this narrative explores the boundaries of sacrifice. Set against the backdrop of turn-of-the-century Rome, it examines whether a heart once given to another can truly belong to God.

The Woman's Part: A Record of Munitions Work
L. K. Yates
Crossing social boundaries and mastering complex machinery, British women step into wartime factories to sustain the nation’s defense.

The World Court (Vol. I, No. 2, Sept. 1915)
Various
Amid the darkening shadow of a world at war, measured minds and fiery partisans clash over whether international law or military might will determine the destiny of nations.

The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. I, No. 5, July 1836)
Various
Quiet observations of youth, philosophy, and romance converge in a mid-nineteenth-century undergraduate journal that balances earnest moral inquiry with sharp, self-aware collegiate humor.