Cabbages and Kings

In Coralio, a dead president’s grave is scrubbed every day, though the hundred thousand dollars he fled with has vanished. Then a telegram arrives for Frank Goodwin, the American banana king—and the sleepy town erupts.

In O. Henry’s 1904 novel, the fictional Central American republic of Anchuria is a sunlit coast of palms, revolutions, and fortunes made from bananas, rubber, and mahogany. Goodwin has earned the townspeople’s respect, but his American wife, Isabel, carries a past entangled with the vanished president and his missing money. Now even a telegram can stir suspicion in Coralio, where the rival political camps watch one another and old adventures leave their traces. Beneath the town’s languid surface, O. Henry follows the hidden threads connecting its comic, romantic, and precarious lives. What message has reached Goodwin—and what else is still buried in Coralio?

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.