On Patrol

A lamp flickers through the spray: “So long! Good luck to you!” Then a sailor disappears into darkness, and his friend can only wait for the names of the overdue.

In John Graham Bower’s First World War poems, the sea is a place of patrol and peril, where ships vanish into winter weather and home is a light on the distant coast. Sailors speak in their own voices, but so do the mothers left behind—and their grief cuts through the proud talk of duty and battle. From a submarine waiting beneath the waves to a destroyer charging through shellfire, these verses hold courage and fear side by side. What does the long patrol demand of those who sail—and those who wait?

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.