And Even Now

A battered portmanteau yields a broken fan—and, from the depths of Sir Max Beerbohm’s memory, the words: “Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.”

In “A Relic,” the opening essay of this early twentieth-century collection, Beerbohm returns to a moonlit terrace in Normandy, where, as a nineteen-year-old, he watched Angélique race from a casino pursued by a bewildered older man. The fan she snapped in fury became the clue to a mystery he longed to solve—and the spark for a story in the manner of Maupassant. But imagining the scene’s atmosphere is easier than inventing what happened next; even the eager young writer must choose whose account to believe. Can a few splintered fan-sticks reveal the truth—or only the stories a writer makes of it?

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.