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Description

Arsène Lupin, with his characteristic wit, plots over the course of nine short stories to steal many of France’s best antiques and artworks from under their owners’ noses. Only his classic opponent Detective Ganimard has the brilliance to attempt to foil Arsène’s plans, albeit with mixed results.

This first collection of nine Arsène Lupin stories were originally serialised in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1905 and translated into English in 1910. The final story of the set features an unauthorised Sherlock Holmes whose appearance annoyed Arthur Conan Doyle; the character’s name was changed to “Herlock Sholmes” for later stories. Arsène Lupin later went on to feature in over fifty stories by Maurice Leblanc along with many other books, films and plays around the world.

Description

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1902, is now considered to be a classic of children’s literature. The twelve tales included are all humorous “origin” stories purporting to tell how certain animals gained their distinctive features. For example, “The Elephant’s Child” tells how the elephant gained its long trunk because of a baby elephant having its nose pulled and stretched by a crocodile.

The stories originated as bedtime tales Kipling invented for his daughter and told to her each night. The stories had to be told in exactly the same words each night—“just so”—or his daughter would complain.

Early editions of Just So Stories were illustrated in black and white by Kipling himself, which lends the collection a certain charm. We have reproduced these illustrations in the Standard Ebooks edition of the book.

Description

Considered by many to be Maugham’s masterpiece, Of Human Bondage is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale. The novel follows Philip, a sensitive young man interested in literature and art, as he searches for happiness in London and Paris. Philip, the ostensible stand-in for Maugham, suffers from a club foot, a physical representation of the stutter that Maugham himself suffered. Philip’s love life, a central aspect to the book, also mirrors Maugham’s own stormy affairs.

Maugham originally titled the book “Beauty from Ashes” before settling on the final title, taken from a section of Spinoza’s Ethics in which he discusses how one’s inability to control one’s emotions results in a form of bondage.

Description

The Enchanted Castle is a novel for young readers by Edith Nesbit, who was writing in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era in Britain. As in her other children’s books, it begins in the everyday world but quickly brings in the fantastical and magical. A large part of the delight of Nesbit’s books is that her children behave in quite ordinary ways, getting into scrapes, getting dirty and their clothes torn, making decisions which seem right to them at the time but which are generally wrong-headed. It’s the contrast between the ordinariness of the children and the magical adventures they become involved in which makes the books so charming.

The Enchanted Castle was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine alongside stories by Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. The first book edition was published in 1907.

In the story, Kathleen and her brothers Gerald and Jimmy find a way into a remarkable garden designed to create a Palladian landscape, full of statues and pseudo-Classical temples and buildings. It is not long before they come across a sleeping Princess. They wake her, and she introduces them to an item of real magical value, a ring which makes its wearer invisible. But once on, the ring won’t come off! “Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible companion will not need to be told how awkward the whole business is,” comments the author, which is indicative of the simple and direct language she uses, and the humor of the books. Even the invisibility ring, however, is not quite as simple as it seems; and many interesting and amusing adventures follow.

Description

Published in 1918, The Madman: His Parables and Poems is the first collection of philosophical poetry and short stories by Lebanese author Khalil Gibran. The Madman is the first work by Gibran that was originally published in English, as compared to his earlier works which were written originally in his native Arabic. The Madman deals with themes of love, loss, spirituality, and the nature of truth.

Description

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was one of the most influential writers of horror fiction in the early 20th century. His fame is mostly posthumous: he was only published in pulp magazines in his lifetime, and never saw financial success. Despite that, Lovecraft’s unique blend of gothicism, horror, and the supernatural, set in an imagined but eerily-real New England, marked a gold standard for horror fiction for decades after his death.

Readers of modern fantasy and horror fiction will certainly recognize Cthulhu, the tentacle-mouthed god who lies asleep in a sunken Atlantean ruin; the Necronomicon, a grimoire of unspeakable power and horror penned by the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred; and the dark, twisted New England countryside of the Miskatonic Valley. These and other features take shape in Lovecraft’s stories, creating a backdrop of the bizarre and evil behind seemingly day-to-day lives. A thread of cosmic horror soon turns anything normal towards madness.

This edition is small because verifying the U.S. public domain status of Lovecraft’s corpus is a difficult, if not impossible, academic exercise, and finding first-edition copies to transcribe is also difficult. This edition will be updated as more transcriptions become verified and available.

Included in this edition are some of Lovecraft’s juvenalia—in particular, “The Alchemist” was written when he was just seventeen or eighteen.

Description

A Study in Scarlet is the novel which first introduced Arthur Conan Doyles’ iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was published in 1887 in a popular magazine, Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It attracted little public attention at the time, but interest in Holmes continued to build with the subsequent series of short stories Doyle wrote featuring the austere, analytical detective—now one of the most well-known characters in all of English literature.

A Study in Scarlet is told from the point of view of Dr. John Watson, a medical doctor who has recently returned to London after suffering serious injury and illness as part of the Army Medical Department deployed to Afghanistan. In precarious health and even more precarious financial straits, he’s looking for cheap lodgings when a friend introduces him to Sherlock Holmes. The pair agree to share the rent of a flat Holmes has found.

Watson is baffled by his companion’s strange nature, his peculiar interests, his unusual breadth of knowledge in certain fields alongside his shocking ignorance in others, and his many strange visitors. Only eventually does Watsonb discover that Holmes has set himself up as the world’s first “consulting detective,” and it’s not long before Watson finds himself assisting Holmes in a mysterious case. The body of a man has been found in an abandoned house, without wounds or other marks of injury. But on the wall, scrawled in blood, is the word RACHE. The subsequent unravelling of the mystery takes many unexpected turns.

Description

Arsène Lupin takes on his most fearsome opponent yet in this second collection of his larcenous adventures. More a loving homage than a straight copy, Herlock Sholmes (changed just enough to avoid fallout from a copyright claim by Conan Doyle) and his companion Wilson are summoned to France initially to throw light on the case of the Blonde Lady. Having encountered Arsène Lupin before, Sholmes is only too happy to get a chance of revenge.

This collection of two stories were originally serialised in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1906 to 1907, and were translated into English in 1910. After an earlier story with an unauthorised Sherlock Holmes, Maurice Leblanc was forced to rename his antagonist for these stories.

Description

The Sign of the Four, initially titled just The Sign of Four, is the second of Doyle’s novels to feature the analytical detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and chronicler Dr. Watson. The action takes place not long after the events in A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, and that prior case is referred to frequently at the beginning of this one.

Holmes is consulted by a young woman about a strange communication she has received. Ten years previously her father Captain Morstan went missing the night after returning from service in the Far East before his daughter could travel to meet him. He has never been seen or heard of ever since. But a few years after his disappearance, Miss Morstan was startled to receive a precious pearl in the mail, with no sender’s name or address and no accompanying message. A similar pearl has arrived each subsequent year. Finally, she received an anonymous letter begging her to come to a meeting outside a London theater that very evening. She may bring two companions. Naturally, Holmes and Watson accompany the young woman to the mysterious meeting, and are subsequently involved in the unveiling of a complex story of treasure and betrayal.

Description

Conan, the Cimmerian barbarian, romps across the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian adventures, slicing down enemy after enemy and trying not to fall too hard for a succession of ladies in need of rescue. Although very much a product of the pulp fantasy magazines of the 1930s, Conan has surpassed his contemporaries to become the quintessential barbarian of the fantasy genre: the muscle-bound and instinct-led hero, always willing to fight his way out of any fix.

Collected here are Howard’s public domain short stories, including ten Conan short stories and the history of Hyboria that Howard wrote as a guide for himself to write from. Gods of the North originally was a Conan story, but after being rejected by the first publisher was rewritten slightly to a character called Amra; it was later republished as The Frost-Giant’s Daughter with the name changed back. The stories were serialised (with a couple of exceptions) in Weird Tales magazine between 1925 and 1936, and have gone on to spawn multiple licensed and unlicensed sequels, comics, films and games.