Robert Louis Stevenson

“Will he live?” asks Walter Raleigh, confronting the question critics pose whenever a popular writer dies. His answer begins not with a promise of immortality, but with a challenge to the very idea.

Writing in the early twentieth century, Raleigh turns to Robert Louis Stevenson: the maker of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but also an artist who loved the work itself more than the prospect of fame. He traces the abundant fancy and disciplined craft behind Stevenson’s books, and wonders what more might have come from a writer still striving to launch a masterpiece. How do we judge a life’s work when its greatest work may never have been written?

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.