Storyology

The four-and-twenty blackbirds, Benjamin Taylor suggests, can be made into hours; the pie, the earth beneath the sky. If every nursery rhyme hides a sun myth, what can’t a mythologist explain?

In Storyology, Taylor takes up folk-lore, sea-lore and plant-lore, asking how familiar tales and ancient legends began—and what they mean. Writing for ordinary readers rather than specialists, he distrusts explanations that turn every story into an allegory of dawn, darkness or the seasons. The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, Red Riding Hood and even the Song of Sixpence become tests of how far interpretation can stretch before it snaps. Perhaps old tales are not coded lessons about the heavens, but stories shaped by people’s experience and imagination. How can we tell the difference?

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.