Ephemera Critica

The more educated a nation becomes, John Churton Collins argues, the greater the danger to its literature.

In late-nineteenth-century Britain, books pour from the presses for a vast new reading public, while Collins sees serious literary standards giving way to novelty, puffery, and mutual back-scratching. He looks back to Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope, whose work was sharpened by readers and rivals they respected, and asks what becomes of literature when writers answer chiefly to the crowd. These essays challenge critics, authors, and universities to restore judgment and rigor to literary study. Can criticism still tell the worthy book from the merely well-advertised one?

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.