Biography for Beginners

Sir Christopher Wren is off to dinner. If anyone calls, he says, tell them he is “designing St. Paul’s”—and in four lines, a great architect’s life becomes a joke about a masterpiece.

E. C. Bentley’s collection turns the grand business of biography into nimble, irreverent verse, offering “miscellaneous examples” for the amusement—and instruction—of the upper forms. Wren shares these pages with Jane Austen, Karl Marx, Sir Walter Raleigh and many more, each caught in a tiny, ridiculous moment: a grievance, a peculiar habit, a line that lands with a snap. Then comes an “Index of Psychology,” ready to classify the virtues and foibles the poems have made gloriously absurd. How much can a life reveal in a handful of rhyming lines?

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.