Heads and Tales

A tailor peers at the tiny skull in Gainsborough’s studio and identifies it correctly—only to hear that it belonged to Julius Caesar as a child.

Adam White’s natural-history miscellany pairs the animal kingdom with the oddities of human nature. Its pages range from the artists and collectors of Britain to the specimens displayed in the British Museum, mixing wry old anecdotes with glimpses of beasts great and small. Here, a painter mistakes a baby’s solemn gaze for a puppy’s; elsewhere, a butterfly sends an avid collector racing over hedge and ditch. The joke is often on the people who claim to know nature best—but what might our fellow creatures reveal about us?

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.