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4,129 public-domain books, summarised. Page 77 of 87.

Plain Facts for Old and Young
John Harvey Kellogg
This guide offers a clinical, moralistic, and physiological examination of sexual health, aiming to curb what the author deems the widespread, dangerous consequences of sexual excess and ignorance in late nineteenth-century American society.

Sesame and Lilies
John Ruskin
To read these lectures is to invite a demanding, eloquent mentor into your library to challenge your reading habits, your social conscience, and your understanding of duty.

The Georgics
Virgil
The earth yields its bounty only to the hand that is willing to shape it, offering a partnership between the soil, the seasons, and the soul.

Character
Samuel Smiles
True greatness is not found in genius or in rank, but in the quiet, consistent cultivation of the individual spirit. This work serves as an enduring manual on how to build a life of purpose, integrity, and self-mastery.

A History of Norwegian Immigration to the United States: From the Earliest Beginning down to the Year 1848
George T. (George Tobias) Flom
The westward movement of early Norwegian pioneers transformed the American landscape, turning isolated wilderness into flourishing rural communities. These accounts chronicle the courageous journey of those who left their ancestral homes to build anew in the nineteenth-century Northwest.

Apologia pro vita sua
John Henry Newman
A man of profound intellect defends the integrity of his life and conscience after a public accusation of dishonesty threatens to dismantle his reputation.

Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling: Illustrated by numerous incantations, specimens of medical magic, anecdotes and tales
Charles Godfrey Leland
An exhaustive exploration of Romani occult traditions, this work bridges the gap between ancient Shamanic roots and the pragmatic, often deceptive, arts of fortune-telling. It serves as an essential, if idiosyncratic, historical record of European folk-magic.

The Craft of Fiction
Percy Lubbock
A novel is not merely a story told; it is a structure built. This guide examines how the greatest masters of fiction have engineered their worlds to hold the reader’s attention.

Parmenides
Plato
The abstract nature of reality is often hidden in plain sight, waiting for the mind to untangle the knotted threads of unity and difference. This dialogue serves as a rigorous, if dizzying, exercise in testing the absolute limits of logic.

Poems of Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
This collection gathers the essence of a singular voice, capturing the movement from restless, shadowy melancholy to a hard-won, meditative peace. It offers a glimpse into a soul that learns to trade the turbulence of youth for the quietude of grace.

Jane Austen and her works
Sarah Tytler
A literary guide that bridges the gap between a classic novelist and a modern reader, offering a thoughtful, condensed pathway into the heart of English domestic fiction.

Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting: Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922
Unknown
Nut trees are not merely ornaments but vital, untapped sources of protein and fat, waiting for a more widespread adoption in the American agricultural landscape.

The Mark of Cain
Andrew Lang
A man of noble birth, desperate to protect a dark secret, finds himself ensnared in a web of his own lethal deception. This Victorian mystery tracks the tragic intersection of a scholar’s philanthropy and a criminal’s cold calculation.

The Uncommercial Traveller
Charles Dickens
An observant wanderer traverses the hidden corners of Victorian England, documenting the dignity, absurdity, and quiet suffering of those overlooked by a rapidly industrializing society.

The Erotic Motive in Literature
Albert Mordell
A daring attempt to decode the hidden lives of authors through the lens of early psychoanalysis, this work argues that every poem, novel, and play is a secret diary of its creator’s unconscious desires.

Songs of Childhood
Walter De la Mare
This collection of verse captures the elusive threshold between the waking world of childhood and the shimmering, often unsettling realm of the imagination. It is a work of quiet intensity, lingering in the memory like a half-remembered dream.

A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance: With special reference to the influence of Italy in the formation and development of modern classicism
Joel Elias Spingarn
The Renaissance transformed the ancient Greek understanding of poetry into a rigid system of rules, a shift that defined the literary standards of the modern world for centuries to come.

Christmas Light
Ethel Calvert Phillips
HOOK A young girl in ancient Bethlehem discovers the true meaning of hope after a miraculous encounter with the Holy Family.

Americanism
Theodore Roosevelt
This collection of addresses serves as a forceful, urgent manifesto on the nature of American identity and the responsibilities of citizenship. It argues that a successful republic requires a unified national spirit, undivided loyalty, and a commitment to duty over individual rights.

My man Jeeves
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
A well-meaning, dim-witted bachelor survives the tribulations of high society and his own poor judgment solely through the quiet, omniscient intervention of his incomparable valet.

Psychology for beginners
Hereward Carrington
Psychology is a vast, evolving science that reaches far beyond the simple study of consciousness to investigate the hidden mechanisms of the human mind. This primer serves as an accessible map to the complex terrain of mental life.

The Malay Archipelago, Volume 1: The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise
Alfred Russel Wallace
A naturalist’s meticulous, multi-year survey of the East Indies, charting the staggering biological diversity of the islands while uncovering the shifting boundaries of nature’s grand design.

Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works
Kālidāsa
These enduring Sanskrit masterpieces capture the heartbeat of human emotion, weaving tales of love, loss, and restoration that resonate across centuries with singular, crystalline beauty. Through poetry and drama, they map the vast landscape of the human heart.

U.S. Copyright Renewals, 1967 July - December
Library of Congress. Copyright Office
A ledger of intellectual property, this document captures the precise moment in 1967 when authors and heirs claimed continued ownership over works originally published decades prior. It serves as a bureaucratic snapshot of the American literary landscape during the middle of the twentieth century.

Something Else Again
Franklin P. (Franklin Pierce) Adams
This collection of verse captures the sharp, playful spirit of a legendary newspaper columnist at the height of his powers. It offers a witty, rhythmic lens through which to view the anxieties and absurdities of early twentieth-century life.

The Happy Prince, and Other Tales
Oscar Wilde
Beauty and cruelty walk hand in hand through these pages, where the smallest acts of sacrifice are met with either profound grace or complete indifference. These stories remain as sharp and haunting as the day they were written.

Home Geography for Primary Grades
C. C. Long
HOOK The world is a classroom waiting to be observed, and this guide invites young students to look beneath their feet and above their heads to understand the earth’s mechanisms.

Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
Unknown
Art is a mirror, not a moral compass, yet the world often mistakes the reflection for the observer’s own soul. This collection examines the firestorm ignited by a single novel, tracing the collision between a writer’s uncompromising vision and a public’s hunger for censorship.

Crowd-horror
Robert E. (Robert Ervin) Howard
A naturally gifted but psychologically fragile heavyweight boxer struggles to overcome a debilitating, trance-like obsession with the crowd's roar until the love of a devoted woman becomes his ultimate, stabilizing anchor.

The White Company
Arthur Conan Doyle
A young monk leaves his cloister to seek the world, only to find himself entangled in the perilous, chivalric quest of a veteran knight during the Hundred Years' War.

The Man Who Knew Too Much
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A man burdened by the terrible clarity of his own political insight moves through a world of shadows, secrets, and high-stakes intrigue. He is the quiet observer of a collapsing social order, witnessing the hidden rot behind the pageantry of power.

Murder at the vicarage
Agatha Christie
The quiet, claustrophobic atmosphere of an English village proves a deadly setting when a local magistrate is found shot dead in the vicar’s study. A seemingly mismatched pair of sleuths must cut through a tangle of false confessions and local gossip to uncover the truth.

The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk
Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess
The Imp of Mischief is a restless, whispering force that leads even the most cautious animals into trouble. Once a prank begins, it rolls forward with the unpredictable, bouncing momentum of a runaway barrel.

The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I
Unknown
This collection gathers the foundational voices of British literature, charting the evolution of prose from the medieval world to the dawn of the Enlightenment. It offers a panoramic view of how English writers have navigated the complexities of faith, politics, and the human spirit over five centuries.

Crimes of Preachers in the United States and Canada
M. E. Billings
This collection gathers newspaper reports of clerical misconduct to challenge the moral exceptionalism often attributed to the clergy. It functions as a somber, encyclopedic record of human frailty within the ministry.

Glimpses into plant-life
Mrs. (Eliza Elder) Brightwen
This guide invites young readers to step outdoors and observe the intricate, living mechanisms of the botanical world through simple, practical field study.

Lectures on the Science of Language
F. Max (Friedrich Max) Müller
Language is a natural, evolving organism rather than a static invention of human artifice. These lectures provide a foundational framework for understanding how words grow, branch, and reveal the history of the human intellect.

The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864: Devoted To Literature And National Policy
Various
This mid-nineteenth-century periodical serves as a vibrant, immediate record of a nation in the throes of civil war, blending urgent political commentary with the literary sensibilities of its time. It acts as both a battlefield dispatch and a reflection on the soul of a democracy.

The tale of Grumpy Weasel
Arthur Scott Bailey
Grumpy Weasel is a tale of a notoriously ill-tempered, slender rascal whose attempts to bully and outwit his neighbors in Pleasant Valley lead to a series of comedic, often narrow, escapes.

Can Such Things Be?
Ambrose Bierce
This collection explores the thin, terrifying veil between the rational world and the supernatural, where human obsession often invites the very haunting it seeks to escape.

Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography
Albert A. (Albert Allis) Hopkins
The secrets of the stage are rarely found in the performance itself, but in the gears, mirrors, and hidden mechanisms that manufacture wonder for a captivated audience.

The history of steam navigation
John Kennedy
The evolution of the steamship represents one of the most transformative leaps in human industry and global travel. This work tracks the relentless ingenuity that bridged the divide between sail and engine.

The Secrets of the Self (Asrar-i Khudi)
Iqbal, Muhammad, Sir
A philosophical manifesto in verse, this work serves as an urgent summons for the individual to cast off passivity and forge a powerful, self-directed identity. By blending theological rigor with a call to worldly action, it argues that true greatness—both for the person and the community—is found in the courageous…

The Tales of Mother Goose: As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696
Charles Perrault
These foundational French fairy tales capture the archetypal struggle between virtue and vice, embedding moral lessons within a landscape of wonder that has captivated readers for over three centuries. They serve as an enduring mirror for the anxieties and aspirations of both children and the adults who guide them.

Shawn of Skarrow
James Tandy Ellis
This narrative follows the coming-of-age of a young man in rural Kentucky, tracking his journey from a river-bound childhood to a life defined by professional purpose and the enduring bonds of his home community.

Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners
William Hazlitt
These essays serve as a masterclass in the art of thinking aloud, capturing the fleeting sparks of human observation with the steady, unpretentious hand of a seasoned conversationalist. They turn the mundane details of daily life into profound meditations on the nature of character, ambition, and the quiet dignity…

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters 01 to 05
Mark Twain
This is the story of a boy caught between the suffocating expectations of "civilized" society and the violent, inescapable gravity of his own past. It is a work of wit, rebellion, and profound unease.

The gunsmith's manual
J. Parish (James Parish) Stelle
A technical guide for the nineteenth-century artisan, this compendium offers an exhaustive look at the mechanics, maintenance, and fabrication of the firearms that defined an era of rapid industrial transition.