Immortal Memories

At a birthday toast to Dr. Johnson, Clement King Shorter begins with an open grave: the scholar who proposed the toast the year before is gone.

In early-twentieth-century England, Shorter’s literary addresses gather readers in the places where writers’ lives still seem close at hand. At Lichfield’s Three Crowns Inn, he raises Johnson’s memory among stories of Anna Seward’s circle, its brilliant visitors, and the city’s crowded literary past. But commemoration is more than praise: Shorter challenges the easy notion that Johnson survives only because Boswell wrote about him, and asks what we lose when we mistake the man for the legend. What, beyond Boswell’s pages, keeps Johnson alive?

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.