Fugitive Pieces

Wind whistles through the cracks of a ruined ancestral hall as the young poet turns to leave, bidding farewell to the heroes whose shields still rattle on its walls. What can he carry with him besides their memory?

Written in his youth, these early poems by Lord Byron move between ancestral pride and private heartbreak. Their world stretches from a fading family seat and the schoolroom to the moment of a last embrace; a speaker grieves for friends and beloved figures, and finds that memory can console even as it keeps sorrow alive. Love, loss and the passing of youth appear not as grand abstractions, but as a cold cheek, a silent farewell, a rose choked by weeds. What remains when the people and places we love are left behind?

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.