Oxford

On a snowbound night, Queen Matilda is lowered from Oxford Castle in white, with a frozen river between her and King Stephen’s reach. What other secrets are written into Oxford’s stones?

In this richly illustrated portrait by Robert Peel and H. C. Minchin, Oxford is more than its colleges: the town’s history reaches back to its first recorded mention in 912 and through the Norman Conquest, when Robert D’Oily built a castle to command the riverside. Its tower still stands as a trace of that turbulent past, among churches, gates and halls shaped by centuries of scholarship and strife. The authors move between the city’s ancient walls and the young generations who fill them, revealing a place where chivalric legend and university life share the same streets. What does Oxford’s architecture remember that its histories cannot tell?

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.