Children’s Ways

A star becomes an eye, a dripping plant is crying—and one small boy greets the letter W as “Dear old boy W.” James Sully begins with a puzzle: how does a child’s fancy make the ordinary world seem alive?

In this late-nineteenth-century study, Sully looks closely at the inner lives of children, gathering their curious names for things and their visions in clouds, hills, and hidden places. He finds no single pattern: one child’s imagination may delight in bright, playful images, while another’s turns toward the strange or alarming. These observations challenge easy assumptions about childhood and invite adults to look again at what a child sees in a sound, a shape, or a distant wood. How much of the world around a child is discovered—and how much is made by the mind?

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.