The Delicious Vice

At forty, a habitual novel-reader shuts an old favorite and asks the question that darkens the room: would life have been better if he had never read it? His answer is a sigh—and a hundred-dollar offer to forget The Three Musketeers and begin again.

On a winter evening, with the lamp casting shadows and the fire inviting him to linger, Young Ewing Allison’s reader looks back over a life spent among books. In this witty, impassioned rhapsody, reading becomes both a “delicious vice” and an impossible longing: to meet beloved stories afresh, before memory has given away their wonders. The veteran reader has sailed stormy seas, crawled through the sewers of Paris, and faced every peril fiction can devise—yet cannot recover the first thrill of any of it. If no joy can happen twice in quite the same way, what can a reader do but sigh?

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.