Curated Shelves
Themed collections drawn from the Gutenberg canon.
American History
Primary sources and accounts of the American experiment.
300 worksAncient History
Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch — primary sources from antiquity.
300 worksBahá'í Faith
Writings and teachings from the Bahá'í tradition.
35 worksBiographies
The genre that built the modern reading public — Boswell's Johnson, Plutarch's Lives, and Frederick Douglass.
300 worksBiology
Darwin's Origin, Huxley — popular-level Victorian/Edwardian science writing.
300 worksBritish History
Primary sources and historical accounts of Great Britain.
300 worksBuddhism
Sutras, commentaries, and reflections from the Buddhist canon.
14 worksChildren & Young Adult Reading
Stories, poems, and adventures for younger readers.
300 worksChristianity
Theology, scripture, and Christian thought from the public domain canon.
194 worksClassics of Literature
The canonical works — broad in difficulty, deep in influence.
300 worksCooking & Drinking
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, The Joy of Cooking's ancestors, and regional cookbooks.
300 worksCrime, Thrillers & Mystery
Doyle, Christie, Chesterton — the puzzles and shadows of the canonical detectives.
299 worksEssays, Letters & Speeches
Emerson, Thoreau, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Cicero — the prose tradition.
300 worksEuropean History
Historical narratives spanning the European continent.
300 worksHinduism
The Vedas, Upanishads, and the broader Hindu literary tradition.
28 worksHow To...
The Victorian/Edwardian self-improvement library — practical wisdom that's still surprisingly applicable.
300 worksIslam
The Qur'an, hadith collections, and works of Islamic scholarship.
25 worksJudaism
Texts and commentaries from the Jewish tradition.
90 worksLaw & Criminology
Blackstone and the foundational legal texts of the English-speaking world.
300 worksMythology, Legends & Folklore
Bulfinch, Hamilton, Frazer — the stories that came before the stories.
300 worksNature/Gardening/Animals
Thoreau's Walden, Burroughs, Muir — the original nature writing.
299 worksPhilosophy & Ethics
Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Plato — the canonical hard reading.
300 worksPhysics
Popular Victorian physics — mostly outdated but historically interesting.
300 worksPlays, Films & Dramas
Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Ibsen — the human voice on the public stage.
300 worksPoetry
Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Yeats — verse from the public domain canon.
300 worksPolitics
Locke, Mill, Hobbes, the Federalist Papers — political philosophy from the public domain.
300 worksScience-Fiction & Fantasy
Wells, Verne, Stoker, Lovecraft — the imaginative tradition before genre had a name.
300 worksTravel Writing
Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, Stevenson, Burton — first-person voices from a more curious age.
300 works