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44,127 public-domain books, summarised. Page 894 of 920.

Bob's Redemption: Captains All, Book 5
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
When a calculating sailor tries to trade a rescue for his crewmate's fiancée, he gets a hilarious lesson in East End justice. W. W. Jacobs turns the dockside barque into a stage for human folly.

Bohemian Society
Lydia Leavitt
This collection of philosophical vignettes, framed as a salon gathering of thinkers, explores the intersection of human suffering, social pretension, and the search for spiritual meaning. It serves as a gentle meditation on the disconnect between our ideals and the realities of modern existence.

Bruvver Jim's Baby
Philip Verrill Mighels
The transformation of a rough, neglected mining camp through the arrival of a singular, fragile foundling proves that even the most hardened lives are capable of profound tenderness.

Call Him Savage
Howard Browne
A time-traveling alien Indian tries to reconquer America for Native Americans, but modern life gets in his way.

Canadian Melodies and Poems
George E. (George Earle) Merkley
A reflective collection of late 19th-century verse, this volume captures the quiet, often melancholy intersection of colonial longing and the search for a distinctly Canadian identity.

Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper: A Story of Cape Cod
James A. Cooper
The sea shapes the men of Cape Cod, but the stories they tell about it sometimes shape the truth itself. Behind every grizzled mariner’s tale, a quiet, fragile reality often waits to be discovered.

Catalogue of Rudimentary, Scientific, Educational, and Classical Works
James S. Virtue (Firm)
A sweeping inventory of Victorian knowledge, this volume preserves a legacy of mid-nineteenth-century intellectual ambition, offering a window into how the era organized the physical, classical, and technical sciences for the emerging reader.

Cum Grano Salis
Randall Garrett
A survival crisis on an alien world turns on a bizarre medical mystery. The solution lies in the secret, self-medicating habits of the unlikeliest hero in the Space Service.

Dangerous Quarry
Jim Harmon
An insurance investigator uncovers a town where a mysterious mineral erodes the human capacity for luck, forcing him into a desperate struggle against a community defined by its own catastrophic incompetence.

Dead men's shoes, vol. 3 (of 3)
M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon
Fortune favors the unexpecting in this Victorian drama, where a web of secrets and a sudden death threaten to destroy a young woman’s future while exposing the true character of those around her.

Dearest
H. Beam Piper
Colonel Ashley Hampton, an aging veteran, finds himself trapped in his own home by relatives who plan to have him committed. His only ally is an invisible, telepathic presence he calls Dearest.

Delaware
G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford) James
A mysterious, composed stranger arrives in a quiet village, weaving his fate into the lives of a noble but impoverished family as they struggle against the machinations of a cold-hearted peer.

Don Sebastian
Anna Maria Porter
A fallen king, stripped of his crown and cast into slavery, must navigate the treacherous boundaries between his lost identity and the man he has chosen to become.

Eingeschneit: Eine Studentengeschichte
Emil Frommel
A weary civil servant seeking a fresh start and a trio of wandering students find their paths unexpectedly joined during an Alpine storm. Stranded by the elements, they trade the intimate histories that define their lives.

Fires and Firemen: from the Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art, Vol XXXV No. 1, May 1855
Anonymous
The firemen of mid-nineteenth-century London are an elite force of hunters, poised to strike at the first ruddy glow of a conflagration that threatens the city's vast wooden and brick landscape.

Four Girls and a Compact
Annie Hamilton Donnell
A group of overworked young women forms a pact to find rest, only to discover that the truest form of relief is found in being needed by someone else.

Harper's Round Table, March 2, 1897
Various
This snapshot of late nineteenth-century American youth culture captures the era’s diverse fascinations, blending serious military history and moral instruction with the playful, intricate diversions of a popular children’s periodical.

Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880: An Illustrated Weekly
Various
The nineteenth century comes alive in this collection, where high-stakes adventure, moral instruction, and the quiet lives of children converge in a vibrant, illustrated tapestry of Victorian-era entertainment and education.

Her Majesty the King
James Jeffrey Roche
The Pasha of Ubikwi faces a dynastic crisis when his only child is born a daughter, threatening his succession and his standing with the Sultan. To survive, he and his sharp-witted wife, Kayenna, decide to pass the girl off as a boy.
Hop O' My Thumb
Joseph Samachson
A high-ranking statesman sacrifices his reputation and his family’s love to orchestrate a desperate, secret gamble against an overwhelming alien force, knowingly playing the role of a traitor to save humanity from total annihilation.

Inside John Barth
William W. Stuart
A man becomes a vessel for a microscopic civilization from the stars, only to discover that being a "Garden of Eden" is a lonely, restrictive, and ultimately tragic fate.

Junior Achievement
William M. Lee
An everyday junior high science teacher steps in to supervise a summer business club, expecting to make simple wax polishes, only to find his young students quietly revolutionizing commercial tech.

Kaipara
P. W. (Peter William) Barlow
A candid, unvarnished account of building a life in the rugged North Island of New Zealand, this narrative captures the trials and quiet triumphs of a nineteenth-century settler.

Kitty's Christmas tree
Lucy Ellen Guernsey
Thirteen-year-old Kitty Tremain struggles to distinguish true kindness from the hollow manipulations of a peer. Her journey toward maturity demands that she confront her own vanity and learn the heavy cost of failing to say "no.

London Cries & Public Edifices
John Leighton
This illustrated guide captures the vanishing sounds and imposing stone facades of mid-19th-century London, offering a poignant snapshot of a city caught between medieval tradition and the accelerating pulse of the industrial age.

Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London)
Lewis Goldsmith
A collection of clandestine reports from Napoleonic Paris, these letters offer a sharp, cynical, and remarkably detailed exposé of the early French Empire’s inner workings and the men who fueled its expansion.

Miracle Gold: A Novel (Vol. 2 of 3)
Richard Dowling
HOOK A brilliant but physically distorted inventor claims to create "miracle gold" while a desperate socialite discovers a royal lineage hidden in her family’s past.

Monthly supplement of the penny magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, issue 32, September 1 to September 29, 1832
Unknown
This issue of a Victorian-era periodical offers a vivid snapshot of early industrial ingenuity and natural history, documenting the era’s fascination with engineering progress and the preservation of national heritage.

Natural History of the Salamander, Aneides hardii
Richard F. Johnston
The Sacramento Mountains salamander thrives in a narrow, high-altitude alpine niche, revealing a life history defined by isolation, specialized habitat, and a remarkably low reproductive rate.

New West Indian Spiders: Bulletin of the AMNH, Vol. XXXIII, Art. XLI, pp. 639-642
Nathan Banks
A precise, systematic examination of tropical arachnid specimens reveals eight previously undescribed species collected across the Caribbean.

Notes and Queries, Number 173, February 19, 1853: A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc
Various
This mid-nineteenth-century periodical serves as a vibrant, decentralized archive of Victorian curiosity, where scholars and enthusiasts gather to trade obscure facts, solve historical puzzles, and refine the edges of their collective knowledge. It is a snapshot of intellectual life in 1853.

Nuala O'Malley
H. (Henry) Bedford-Jones
HOOK Amidst the scorched landscape of Cromwellian Ireland, a displaced nobleman rallies a band of outcasts to dismantle a sinister usurper and win the heart of a fierce sea-roving chieftain.

Oklahoma and Other Poems
Freeman Edwin Miller
A wild frontier springs to life through ringing meter, where the thunder of a land run yields to quiet farmsteads and the ache of memory.

Old Gold: The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig
George Manville Fenn
A band of adventurers seeks a legendary city of gold in the depths of South America, only to find the river as elusive as the treasure itself.

On the inaccuracies which probably exist in the census returns of ages
Thomas A. (Thomas Abercrombie) Welton
The numbers we use to define a society are often ghosts of the truth, shaped by pride, forgetfulness, and the simple human tendency to round off the edges of our own histories. This exploration of the 19th-century census reveals how easily the most rigid statistics can bend under the weight of ordinary lives.

Our little brown house, a poem of West Point
Maria L. (Maria Louisa) Stewart
This poem serves as a nostalgic, rhythmic tribute to the shared life of cadets at West Point, bridging the gap between their disciplined military training and their quiet, formative years in a humble chapel.

Philosopher Jack
R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne
Philosopher Jack is an earnest, argumentative student who, feeling his life has hit a dead end, decides to cast off his academic woes and head to sea.

"Pig-Headed" Sailor Men: From "The Strange Adventure of James Shervinton, and Other Stories" - 1902
Louis Becke
Obstinate ocean captains face blinding squalls and hidden coral reefs in three vivid, true-to-life tales of maritime misadventure in the turn-of-the-century South Pacific.

Politics of Alabama
Joseph C. (Joseph Columbus) Manning
A fierce polemic from 1893, this account exposes the systemic election fraud and political corruption that defined Alabama’s Gilded Age. It captures the rise of a populist insurgency challenging an entrenched, undemocratic machine.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 105, November 11, 1893
Various
This collection serves as a satirical time capsule, capturing the restless, witty, and deeply political spirit of late-Victorian London.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-02-04
Various
The world of 1920, as captured in these pages, is a place of restless reconstruction, where the mundane struggles of post-war life collide with the absurdity of a changing social order. It is a mosaic of satirical observations, fictional sketches, and humorous commentary that reflects a society trying, with varying…

Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890
Various
This collection offers a window into the late Victorian mind, blending sharp political satire with the lighthearted absurdity of a society obsessed with fashion, public spectacles, and the minor irritations of urban existence. It is a record of a specific moment—January 1890—where high-minded parliamentary debates,…

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, February 5, 1919
Various
This volume serves as a snapshot of British life in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, capturing the weary, eccentric, and hopeful transition from total mobilization to the uncertain realities of peace.

Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 156, January 22, 1919
Various
This collection captures the fractured, weary, and dryly irreverent spirit of post-Armistice England, where the absurdity of bureaucracy competes with the fading echoes of a global catastrophe. It serves as a quintessential time capsule of a society attempting to laugh while picking up the pieces of a vanished world.

Punchinello, Volume 1, No. 08, May 21, 1870
Various
Through satirical reports, mock dispatches, and sharp social commentary, a nineteenth-century weekly magazine turns a critical, comedic eye on post-Civil War American politics and culture.

Right and wrong in Massachusetts
Maria Weston Chapman
The struggle to end slavery is never a simple march toward justice; it is a battle fought as much against the compromise of one's own allies as against the institution of slavery itself.

Rose and Roof-Tree
George Parsons Lathrop
The poet scales the height of human feeling, turning common grief and the rhythm of the seasons into a ladder for the soul. Between the first bud and the final frost, a quiet grace persists.

Rural Problems of Today
Ernest R. (Ernest Rutherford) Groves
The country is not merely a place of production but a landscape of the mind, where the habits of the soil shape the character of the soul. Understanding the rural experience requires looking past the harvest to the internal lives of those who sustain it.