Forgotten books, back in print.
The Library Archive is a free reading room for public-domain fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: boys' inventor serials, scientific romances, westerns, northern stories, weird tales and pulp magazine fiction, alongside scanned Big Little Books, comics and magazines. Read it here, in the browser, one chapter or page at a time.
All titles are in the public domain in the United States.
Big Little Books
Chunky dime-store books from the Depression and after: Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, the Lone Ranger and dozens more.
Mysteries
Detective fiction from Sherlock Holmes to the golden age of the whodunit and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot.
Westerns
Range wars and lone riders from Zane Grey, written while the frontier was still in living memory.
Science Fiction
Early 1900s science fiction evolved from late-Victorian "scientific romances" into the high-octane American pulp magazines of the 1920s
Comics
Golden Age comic books: Captain Marvel's Whiz Comics, Spy Smasher, Phantom Lady and an early picture novel.
Green Books
The travel guides that told Black motorists where they could safely eat, sleep and buy gas in the era of segregation.
The Crisis
The magazine of the NAACP, founded and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois: news, essays, poetry and protest from Black America.
Pulps
Hero pulps and hard-boiled detectives from the ten-cent magazines: The Spider, the Phantom Detective and Captain Hazzard.
Tom Swift
The boy inventor of Shopton, New York: motorcycles, airships, submarines and electric rifles, read in series order.
Brochures
House catalogues and sales brochures: homes you could pick from a page and have shipped, from Sears kits to the all-steel Lustron.
Canadian Mounties
Stories of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the fur trade and the far north.
Weird Tales
Horror and the uncanny, from Robert W. Chambers's King in Yellow to H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tales circle.