Spinning Tops

Asked what the British Association’s members do, a shy Leeds schoolboy gives an answer no one expects: “Please, sir, I know—they spin tops!” John Perry turns the joke into a challenge to grown-up science.

At the Association’s 1890 meeting in Leeds, Perry invites his audience to look again at a child’s toy. A spinning sheet of paper resists a blow; a soft hat takes shape and races across a table, then collapses when it stops. These are not parlour tricks: Perry argues that the behaviour of spinning bodies bears on engineering, astronomy, magnetism and the motion of the Earth itself. The challenge is to recover the curiosity adults leave behind with their childhood tops—and discover what spinning can teach us about the world. How can motion make the yielding seem solid?

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.