Obiter Dicta

Thomas Carlyle despised men of letters and longed for action—yet left the world thirty-four volumes. What do you make of a man whose legacy was everything he claimed to disdain?

In these late-19th-century essays, Augustine Birrell turns his critical eye on literature, character and the difficulty of judging either fairly. He begins with Carlyle, refusing to dismiss him as merely an eccentric old man: here is a writer who prized silence and action, yet spent his life writing. Birrell finds a mind at once mystical and stubbornly attentive to facts, able to see the universe as a symbol and history as a storehouse of vivid human detail. Across the collection, what can an author’s contradictions reveal about the work he leaves behind?

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.