Stories in Verse

“Violets! Violets! Violets!” A flower seller’s cry sounds to the passerby like a voice “longing to die”—until he sees the young woman carrying the blooms.

Henry Abbey’s late-nineteenth-century narrative poems move between the roar of the city and the quiet of the countryside, where love can seem just within reach. In the opening poem, a flower seller’s beauty and worn-down circumstances stir a stranger’s pity; buying her violets, he wonders why the touch of her hand feels so divine. Other verses follow hearts pursuing, losing, and hoping again, with hardship close beside tenderness. In a world that can grind down a life and leave a beautiful face with few to pity it, can one fleeting encounter become more than a moment?

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.