George Washington

At sixteen, George Washington found his bed was “nothing but a little straw” beneath a blanket alive with lice and fleas. By morning, he had decided he would rather sleep outdoors.

In colonial Virginia, a young Washington leaves the comfort of plantation life to survey Lord Fairfax’s vast western lands, where weeks alone in the wilderness test his nerve and self-reliance. Writing in the early twentieth century, William Roscoe Thayer sets out to find the man beneath the legends: not the priggish boy of the cherry-tree tale, nor the polished figure whose letters were edited into respectability, but a vigorous youth who hunted, rode, danced, and kept a keen eye on what he saw. What did the wilderness teach him that would shape the man to come?

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.