Our Own Set

“Where is your wife?” In the Ilsenberghs’ Roman salon, Erich Truyn answers twice: “I do not know.”

Rome, 1870: the Pope holds the Vatican, the King his court at the Quirinal, and Austrian aristocrats gather in a palazzo where politics and gossip mingle over tea. Count Otto Ilsenbergh sees a liberal ministry as a sign that all things are ending; his wife watches the company, while the icy-looking Truyn arrives with his shy young daughter and a silence around his absent wife. Then the charming Count Sempaly turns a duke’s demand for a private washing basin into a joke about equality. Beneath the salon’s wit and ceremony, old loyalties and private wounds are already showing. What lies behind Truyn’s chilling “I do not know”?

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.