The City That Was

“I’d rather be a busted lamp post on Battery Street than the Waldorf-Astoria,” says Willie Britt. Then Will Irwin gives the boast its elegy: old San Francisco is dead.

In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, Irwin turns to the city of steep hills, fog-softened streets, cable cars, and a harbor opening onto the Pacific. His portrait follows the character of a place where Italian houses clung to cliffs, houseboats sheltered in quiet coves, and romance seemed to hang in the air. But San Francisco is now a horde of refugees among ruins, and the city that rises again may be modern—and ordinary. Can it rebuild without losing the peculiar spirit that made it San Francisco?

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.