Persia Revisited

At Baku, Sir Thomas Edward Gordon’s visit to the oil wells seems finished—until two suddenly erupt, hurling dark crude hundreds of feet into the air.

In autumn 1895, Gordon travels from London toward Tehran by rail and Caspian steamer, through busy ports and a landscape reshaped by trade. At Baku, he finds Persian workers carrying the city’s goods and building its railways—men whose energy abroad seems strikingly different from the idleness he observes at home. The oil gush is a vivid glimpse of the fortunes being made, but Gordon’s journey leads into a Persia adjusting to new rulers and facing foreign ambitions. What accounts for the difference between the Persians he meets abroad and the country they leave behind?

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.