De Libris

A battered 1637 folio, once relegated to the floor, bears a dedication to a girl whose name has outlived every certainty about her. Austin Dobson cannot leave Mlle. de Mons alone.

In De Libris, Dobson wanders among old volumes whose histories cling to them as stubbornly as their bindings: a handwritten note, a forgotten owner, a book that may once have been a child’s picture-book. His essays and verse celebrate the accidents and associations that make a book more than its text, while letting curiosity lead him from Ovid to Bacon, Bewick and Pepys. A scrawl in a stranger’s hand can open a door to another age—but how much of the person behind it can Dobson truly recover?

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.