Interesting Old Books I have Found Online

[Ayahuasca]

"The Unfortunate Englishman, or a Faithful Narrative of the Distresses and Adventures of John Cockburn, and five other English mariners"

https://archive.org/details/unfortunateengli00cock

True story, published 1803.

John Cockburn's ship is attacked and captured by pirates, the one woman on board is not treated well...nor are the pirate's prisoners...John is marooned on a desert island, then captured by other, worse, pirates...then left to fend for himself in the wilderness... makes 'Pirates of the Caribbean' look very tame.


Any other long out-of-print books that deserve to be read?

[stuartmmcfc]

I really hope I'm proved wrong, but I suspect this will be a very short thread having seen the nethandrals PH attracts

[Flip Martian]

stuartmmcfc said:

I really hope I'm proved wrong, but I suspect this will be a very short thread having seen the nethandrals PH attracts

Neanderthals?

I suspect they don't read books and skip over this forum altogether.

I suspect this could be an interesting thread. My contribution would be discovering old Mark Twain books via Project Gutenberg. I don't have my ebook reader with me to check the title but he wrote a travelogue while going across America by stagecoach with his brother - his wit shines through (while perhaps not as funny ha ha as it was then) and the descriptions of America and the people he meets are fascinating. A way of life long long gone.

[anonymous-user]

I found this exhibition catalogue online whilst looking for images from one of Jacques Tati's films, 4 squid plus postage from a bookshop on the outskirts of Florence. The web is great for this sort of thing, it actually had a photo of the picture I was looking for as well.

Not exactly an old book I know, obscure would be a better term.

[rst99]

On the same topic as the OP I can recommend Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Dana.

An amazing memoir of a sailor's trip around the Americas in the 1800s.

http://manybooks.net/titles/danarichetext032ybrm10...

[Turquoise]

Covenants with Death. Published in the 1930's. A sobering pictoral history of war.

[TorqueDirty]

Not an old book but a maritime book relating to the 1820's, I can heartily recommend In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick. This true story was the inspiration for Moby Dick.

Excellent, if rather sobering read!