— Ahab, to the crew. And to you.
We restore forgotten public-domain books — read them free here, or buy our printed editions.
recently added to the shelves
the catalogue, by Melville’s measure
In the chapter on Cetology, Melville sorts the whales as a printer sorts a press — the Folio, the Octavo, the Duodecimo. We keep his shelving.
The largest heft — histories, treatises, the long arguments that reward a winter.
Middling heft — memoirs, dispatches, a life told at the length a life deserves.
The smallest heft — pamphlets, orations, the sharp thing said quickly and kept close.
a folio, opened
The Folio · 1896 · restored 2025
William McKinley — Before he was a president shot in Buffalo, McKinley was the Republican party's chief theorist of the protective tariff — and this is his case, made at length and without a press secretary between you and it.
We have reset the whole of it in fresh type, kept the 1896 argument intact, and added a foreword that says plainly what the book is and is not. You may read the man on his own terms, which is more than the newspapers of either century will offer you.
Restored from the copy scanned by Cornell University Library and hosted at the Internet Archive.
“Cheap merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country.”
anatomy of a book · a standing glossary
A restorer ought to know the body he mends. The full glossaryis added to as we go — and, we’re told, the part of the house most passers-by come to read.