AN ECLECTIC LIBRARY.

About the Eclectic Library.

This is an ever-growing collection of books on line that have proved interesting or useful for various whimsical reasons. Our preference here is for scanned page images of the original book, but we make some exceptions when a useful electronic text is available and the scanned page images are not.

One advantage of an electronic collection is that an item does not have a physical location, so books that fit more than one category will be found in more than one place.

In some cases, you will find quotations from contemporary reviews, which give us some notion of the impression a work made when it first appeared before the public.

This site has grown over many years and has gone through several different formats. The pages have mostly been revised to a simple style that should be easily accessible on mobile devices, but some pages are still in various older formats from years ago.

Copyrights: Most of the books listed here are in the public domain, but not all of them. If you use text from a book listed in this library, it is of course your responsibility to make sure that you are complying with copyright law in your country, province, state, county, city, parish, or township.

The text of the site itself is released to the public domain under a CC0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.