Literary Byways

Jean Paul Richter wrote with pigeons cooing in the room and his mother at work by the stove; Carlyle, by contrast, padded his walls against the neighbors’ noise. What can a writer’s working habits tell us about the work itself?

In these late-nineteenth-century essays, William Andrews turns to the lesser-seen corners of literary life: the rooms, routines and hard bargains behind familiar books. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary took seven years, six copyists and a costly correction after he wrote on both sides of his paper; the making of the Encyclopædia Britannica brought another kind of struggle, as editor Joseph Tytler worked at a wash-tub desk in a poor lodging. Here genius sits beside drudgery, ingenuity beside want—and even a dictionary can have a story as lively as its words. What other surprises lie behind the books we think we 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.