The Great Discovery

Across the sea, guns boom beneath the stars—and the familiar word “Good-bye” suddenly carries the weight of a mother sending her son to war. In one Scottish parish, even a man who calls prayer superstition finds himself reaching for a hymn-book.

Norman Maclean’s early-20th-century essays begin in a hillside community shaken from years of ease by the First World War. As sons leave for France and fear reaches the homes beneath the hills, the church fills with people who once let its bell ring in vain. The narrator watches a neighbour, a confident skeptic whose own son is at the front, falter during a prayer for the troops. What can faith offer when reason seems powerless and the next “Good-bye” may be the last?

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.