Sketches New and Old

For eighteen months, his watch keeps perfect time—until one jeweler “fixes” it. Soon it races thirteen days ahead, falls behind the world, and seems to have a mind of its own.

In Mark Twain’s 1875 collection, everyday American life becomes a workshop for comic disaster: unreliable machines, overconfident experts, and interruptions that derail even the grandest thoughts. The narrator’s once-trustworthy watch passes from repairer to repairer, each confident diagnosis leaving it more unruly—and its owner poorer, later, and closer to despair. Elsewhere, a man trying to write on political economy is repeatedly waylaid by a lightning-rod salesman. In these sketches, good sense has a hard time keeping its footing, and a small inconvenience can grow into an absurd predicament. How much worse can a watch get before its owner gives up on time altogether?

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.