Tender Buttons

“A carafe, that is a blind glass.” Gertrude Stein begins with an everyday object—and makes it strange enough to look at twice.

Published in 1914, Tender Buttons moves through Objects, Food, and Rooms, where a cushion, a plate, or a piece of coffee refuses to stay merely itself. Stein’s sentences turn, repeat, and collide, testing how much a thing can change when its familiar name no longer tells us what to see. Here, colors deepen, boxes multiply, and the ordinary becomes a puzzle of sensation and meaning. What might a table, a ribbon, or a carafe reveal when language stops taking its usual path?

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.