Lucasta

“Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind”: in one of Richard Lovelace’s parting songs, the speaker turns from Lucasta’s “chaste breast” toward war.

Published in 1649, Lucasta gathers songs, odes and sonnets shaped by love in a time of conflict. Its speaker praises Lucasta’s beauty and virtue, yet distance keeps intruding: he sings of going beyond the seas, going to war, and writing from prison. The verses can be tender, playful or defiant, but devotion is never quite free of danger or separation. How far can a song carry a lover when the world keeps drawing them apart?

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.