Microcosmography

A child, John Earle suggests, is humanity in miniature: a “small letter” before the world has taught it the language of vice.

In these character sketches, early-seventeenth-century England becomes a gallery of human habits and pretensions. Earle, a bishop and scholar, turns his sharp, playful eye on everyone from the young preacher and grave divine to the dull physician and the man dissatisfied with everything. His portraits are brief, but their wit has room for tenderness as well as mischief: the child’s innocence is only one moment in a world where vanity, folly and self-deception soon appear. How much has the world changed—and how much of Earle’s little piece of it will look familiar?

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.