Micrographia

A needle that looks sharp to the naked eye becomes, under Robert Hooke’s microscope, a blunt, ragged plateau—broad enough, he says, for a hundred armed mites to stand side by side.

Published in 1665, Micrographia takes readers into a world hidden in the everyday: the rough edge of a razor, the pits in a printed dot, the flaws in a polished surface. Hooke begins with the simplest possible object, then asks what careful observation can show that unaided sight cannot. A tool that seems perfectly made proves uneven; even the neatest human work looks clumsy under magnification, while nature’s smallest forms suggest astonishing intricacy. If a needle’s point is no point at all, what else have we mistaken for smooth, sharp, or simple?

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.