Style

An iron pen—rigid, blunt, almost crude—has somehow become the name for the most supple of arts. For Walter Raleigh, style reaches far beyond sentences: it is the enduring mark by which a person gives himself away.

In this early-twentieth-century essay, Raleigh follows the idea of style from literature into painting, music, acting—even cricket. With wit and vivid metaphor, he asks what writing is really doing beneath its borrowed talk of building, weaving and painting. The writer’s instrument is language; the audience is always there, listening or looking. But words can do more than please the senses: they can stir the sleeping memories and emotions of the mind. How does a mark on the page awaken a whole inner world?

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.