An Esoteric Library

I used to hoard books. Now I hoard epubs. I keep them on my old kindle; I have nearly 2,000 books– and the stack never gets any heavier! Most of these come from Gutenberg, because I like the old authors, and also– free downloads. Many of these gutenberg files have been edited by me, because I like a decent-looking page to read, and also illustrations if I can get them. Here’s a catalogue of some of them, as I fix ’em up.

Read online;

A. A. Milne’s sublime not-a-children’s story Once On A Time:   Start reading here
(and download the book as well)

Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories; Start reading here

The Etext Library

E. Nesbit She is probably best known for her series “The Railway Children” but her output exceeded forty books for children alone.  I have a baker’s dozen that I am working my way through.

Read online; a chapter (about writing poetry) from  The Treasure Seekers

Doctor Dolittle; Seven, thus far. More, I sincerely hope, to come.

Some oddities; The King of Gee-Whiz, how’s that for a name! also a lovely half-a-story by the great Walter De la Mare,  two riffs on Peter Pan from J. M. Barrie, and adventures in baby-sitting from the Victorian humorist W. Heath Robinson.

Frank R. Stockton; The writer of the classic; “The Lady? or, The Tiger?” will charm and  beguile you with his wide range of interests and his fluid storytelling skills.

Read online; The Floating Prince

A Literary Miscellany; The glorious Steppenwolf, with new illustrations from a Spanish artist, and The King In Yellow a forerunner of the Lovecraftian style of horror.

This is The Con-Fusion

Concatenation, Construction, Conversation, Continuation, Fusion.

These are our blogs;

The Principle of Moments; a multi-braned, multi-brained, experiment-in-progress.

The Dancing Goddesses ; addendum and annotation for the book of that name, by author Elizabeth Wayland Barber

Ronald Smart Writes;  stories and memoirs with a mid-century touch

These are our services;

An esoteric library of epub files 

CHAPTER 1

King Merriwig of Euralia sat at breakfast on his castle walls. He lifted the gold cover from the gold dish in front of him, selected a trout and conveyed it carefully to his gold plate. He was a man of simple tastes, but when you have an aunt with the newly acquired gift of turning anything she touches to gold, you must let her practise sometimes. In another age it might have been fretwork.

The Floating Prince

“If I want a kingdom, I must build up one for myself, and that is just what I will do. I will gather together my subjects as I go along. The first person I meet shall be my chief councilor of state, the second shall be head of the army, the third shall be admiral of the navy, the next shall be chief treasurer, and then I will collect subjects of various classes.”

from the collection of stories by Frank Stockton

The Story of Little Cacinella

Little Cacinella (ladybug) looked around and said, “Very nice.” She stretched her tiny wings, rubbed one little thin leg against the other, looked around again and said:”How very, very nice! How warm the sun! How blue the sky! How green the grass! How very, very nice! and all this is mine!”

Chapter 4. Good Hunting

‘A Princess or a poetry book,’ said Noel sleepily. He was lying on his back on the sofa, kicking his legs. ‘Only I shall look for the Princess all by myself. But I’ll let you see her when we’re married.’
‘Have you got enough poetry to make a book?’ Dicky asked that, and it was rather sensible of him, because when Noel came to look there were only seven of his poems that any of us could understand.

(an excerpt from The Treasure Seekers, by E. Nesbit.)

The Dollar Watch and the Five Jack Rabbits

  Long ago, long before the waylacks lost the wonderful stripes of oat straw gold and the spots of timothy hay green in their marvelous curving tail feathers, long before the doo-doo-jangers whistled among the honeysuckle blossoms and the bitter-basters cried their last and dying wrangling cries, long before the …