About 37 minutes
The Lake Gun — Themes and Context
Exploration Survival Adventure Tales
8,375 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #2328
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Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 43 minutes
The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut — Inside the Classic
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
9,676 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #3183About 48 minutes
The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo From "Tales from All Countries" — Text and Context
Science Fiction Utopias
10,962 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #3616Search stored excerpts and compare books → Choose by your preferences →
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-25. Coverage: 99 public books, 99 available source excerpts.
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Independent digital catalogue
NMEER Public Domain Literature Library: Adventure, Classics, History & More
The NMEER Public Domain Literature Library presents 99 public-domain works from Project Gutenberg, selected for their literary and historical interest. The catalogue is organized into four overlapping categories—Exploration Survival Adventure Tales, Fantasy Juvenile Worlds, Science Fiction Utopias, and Historical Psychological Social Fiction—each grouping books by shared subject, setting, or narrative mode. To help you enter the collection, we offer three practical reading paths: the Survival Path (starting with Jack London's The Mutiny of the Elsinore), the Social Observation Path (beginning with Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage), and the Humor Path (starting with Lucretia P. Hale's The Peterkin Papers). These paths cross categories, reflecting the way many works span multiple themes.
99 public-domain works86 represented authorsSource-attributed catalogue records
Subject gateways
Explore by Theme
Browse the library by theme, era, or type of original document.
01
Exploration Survival Adventure Tales
Stories of childhood, exploration, resilience and imaginative adventure represented across the current public-domain collection.
02
Fantasy Juvenile Worlds
A focused group of public-domain works connected by subject, literary setting and recurring questions.
03
Science Fiction Utopias
Works exploring technology, imagined futures, discovery and speculative changes in society and everyday life.
04
Historical Psychological Social Fiction
Texts connected with historical lives, social customs, institutions and the worlds in which people lived.
Literature — Editor’s Selection
Newly Catalogued by NMEER
Helen's Babies — Reading Notes
In Fantasy...
Jeanne of the Marshes — Edition ...
In Science...
Omoo: Adventures in the South Se...
In Explora...
Simon the Jester — Themes and Co...
In Fantasy...
The Recollections of Geoffrey Ha...
In Histori...
The Man Who Kept His Money in a ...
In Science...
Coniston — Complete — Story, Set...
In Histori...
Coniston — Volume 04 — Themes an...
In Histori...
About these records
Frequently Asked Questions
How the collection is organized, presented and corrected.
It generally means that the represented source text is no longer protected by copyright in the applicable jurisdiction or has been released for public use. Status may vary by country and edition.
A record may include the title, author, category, cover, description, edition information, source references and available reading or download options.
A category reflects a work’s principal subjects, literary setting, source type and relationship to nearby records in the collection.
The catalogue adds navigation, metadata and editorial context. The represented source text retains its wording, edition information and rights status.
Use the contact page and include the work title, page address and the exact attribution, category, metadata or source detail requiring attention.
Catalogue stewardship
NMEER Catalogue
Catalogue information
This digital library contains 99 historical editions and 86 authors across four categories. The records are maintained for scholarly reference.
