Samuel Johnson

As an infant, Samuel Johnson was carried to Queen Anne to be touched for the king’s evil. The royal touch failed, but illness and superstition, Leslie Stephen writes, would haunt him all his life.

In Lichfield in 1709, Johnson was born above his father’s bookshop, into a household marked by ambition, poverty and uneasy health. His failing sight and strange, irresistible rituals seemed to trap a powerful body; inside it, however, was a prodigious mind, devouring books with an appetite as unruly as his own movements. How would this awkward, afflicted boy turn his scattered reading into the strength of a formidable intellect?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.