Yesterdays with Authors

A poet’s portrait has slipped from its frame amid the wreckage of a great house. Years later, James T. Fields looks into Alexander Pope’s sensitive eyes and hears the past begin to speak.

In his nineteenth-century home, publisher James T. Fields keeps company with portraits of writers, treating them as old friends and inviting readers to listen in. He begins with Pope, whose likeness leads back to London in 1732, when painter Jonathan Richardson was asked to come sketch the poet’s dead mother before she was buried. Fields finds in the portrait not just a famous face, but a man of tenderness and courage, beset by enemies who mistook his brilliance for a provocation. What more will these silent companions tell when Fields begins to gossip?

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.