Public Domain reading recommendations

The Time Machine is an obvious choice. Anyone have more obscure suggestions?

ETA: It only needs to be Public Domain somewhere.

edited 30th Oct '10 7:22:27 PM by occono

That's not public domain. In fact HG's estate is terribly protective of it.

I'd recommend the stories of Sherlock Holmes, of course. Or Lovecraft. Or both.

edited 30th Oct '10 1:58:59 PM by EddieValiantJr

The page says it is in the United States, anyway......O_0

Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain,

The Time Machine is certainly public domain. Copyright doesn't last long enough for it not to be.

Being a horror fan, I recommend The King In Yellow and The Gods Of Pegana. The latter was Tolkienian worldbuilding before Tolkien.

Alexander Dumas,Daniel Defoe, Herman Melville, Machiavelli

edited 30th Oct '10 3:48:45 PM by Roman

Rule of thmub is that anything written before 1923 is definitely in the public domain in the U.S. (though, in cases like Tarzan, trademarks may still apply). Anything written between 1923 and some point in ... I think it's the early 60's ... may or may not be in the public domain, depending on whether the copyright was renewed.

The Bible, Dracula. Edgar Allan Poe

edited 30th Oct '10 3:51:13 PM by Roman

James Joyce before his wacko unreadable prose phase. Try A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example.

I found The House On The Borderland on Gutenberg...

If you're in North America Arsene Lupin is in the public domain. He needs additional fans more than that fils de pute anglais does.

Dracula, Doctor Faustus, The Sea Wolf, The Time Machine (it's on Gutenberg), Pilgrims Progress (finally, the writer didn't feel it was necessary to mix Greek mythology with Christianity! YMMV), The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man, Around the World in 80 Days, and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.

I have more books on my nook, but I haven't read them yet. I'll either edit this post, or repost, when I've read more.

Totally forgot Pilgrims Progress. Yes, completely awesome and one of my favorite books.

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

it's like Robin Hood except it's actually readable

edited 1st Nov '10 7:51:59 PM by BurningBusch

Seconding The Gods of Pegana.

Don Quixote is also a good read, but it's originally in Spanish and translations old enough be in the public domain tend to be problematic, at least according to the academics who write new translations. Along the same lines, we have all the Greek and Roman authors, the Norse eddas and sagas, Beowulf and so on. All worth reading, but translations may not be in the public domain.

I think some of Arthur Machen's work fits. The Great God Pan is a good starting point, probably the best-known of his works. If you like Lovecraft, you'll like Machen.

The first ten or so Arsene Lupin novels by Maurice Leblanc are public domain. I didn't read very far into them but the ones I did read were pretty good, so I recommend them.

I'm a Poe fan myself. I'd also recommend Kafka, but it's surprisingly hard to find his stuff online.

edited 3rd Nov '10 4:02:15 PM by feotakahari

I'd also recommend Kafka, but it's surprisingly hard to find his stuff online.

Here's what stuff is and isn't Public Domain, most has been renewed until the 2020s

edited 3rd Nov '10 4:16:48 PM by occono

What about Hemmingway? I don't know whether his works are public domain, but some of them are nearly old enough.

Dunno. The cutoff is 1923, and I found this earlier thing which was published in 25, so.

@feotakahari You can find some Kafka stuff here: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/k#a1735 Unfortunately, most of it is in German, but The Metamorphosis and The Trial is in English.

• Juvenal and Martial
• Cicero and Seneca
• Machiavelli
• Omar Khayyam

http://www.readprint.com/

One more thing; on gutenberg I found a five volume set of Poe's short stories.

Volume One: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2147 Volume Two: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2148 Volume Three: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2149 Volume Four: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2150 Volume Five: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2151

Enjoy!