This Simian World

“Awful, aren’t they!” Potter says, staring at the Sunday crowds on upper Broadway. But his companion sees something more than vacant faces: a whole civilization behaving exactly as its simian ancestry might lead you to expect.

In Clarence Day’s wry philosophical comedy, a stroll past New York’s apartment houses opens into a grand argument about what humanity is—and what it might have been. The narrator and Potter look at people, then imagine the ancient contest for dominion among the animals: ants with their tireless industry, apes with their chatter, and other creatures with very different gifts. Each possible ruler brings its own virtues, absurdities, and dangerous limits. If our instincts have shaped the world we made, what sort of world would another species have built?

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.