Russia

The Tsar took a ruler to the map, drew a straight line between St. Petersburg and Moscow, and ordered the railway built that way. For four hundred miles, the train obeyed—while towns stood far off to either side.

In late nineteenth-century imperial Russia, vast distances, frozen rivers and state commands shape every journey. Donald Mackenzie Wallace, a British observer who spent years learning the country from within, finds comedy as well as frustration in its travel: trains that leave towns behind, rivers that alternately flood and run shallow, and plans bent to the needs of the state. That straight railway line looks like an engineering marvel—or an imperial absurdity. Which was it, and what else might Russia’s routes reveal?

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.