Obscure Historical Books

Users share links to digitized rare books, historical documents, and literary references from archives like Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and academic libraries, often discovered via random searches or bibliographic rabbit holes.

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#6015
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2007
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Keywords

PMC1034829 princeton.edu METHOD EGYPTIAN ON catalog.php content.asp h.htm nlm.nih harvard.edu book tailor century english search books historian historians dress history

Sample Comments

IntrepidWorms • Jun 10, 2021 • View on HN

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_AleschThis came from a keyword search- seems to match up. I'd be interested in reading more if OP can post that book title.

shrubble • Dec 23, 2025 • View on HN

The book mentioned can be seen here: https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A00a...

macartain • Sep 23, 2025 • View on HN

great rabbit-hole - https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf - for those unencumbered by search engine skills. 250 years indeed...

froh • Dec 29, 2020 • View on HN

The book I read is the first link at the bottom of my message above. In there I randomly picked from the bibliographic references, just to double check: is this so?The second link I've provided above might be the us english language precursor of the book I've read. It has the same primary author and it came up when I googled for the German one. So they seem to be tightly related. I don't know if that has a comparably thorough bibliography, though. And the referenced books

mdp2021 • Jul 24, 2023 • View on HN

Remarkable publication, The Collector. Also about History and Philosophy.

devindotcom • Mar 15, 2023 • View on HN

And Butler himself:https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/1066.htmlAn interesting read if you haven't already read Erewhon.

gsf_emergency_2 • Jul 25, 2025 • View on HN

Ah sorrychapter 10 of similar title from the book https://extras.springer.com/?query=978-3-642-12820-2pp491 is the autobio(I'd thought for a moment it'd be more prudent to offer the proceeds from UK-based web-intrigue than Russian ;)

usernamebias • Oct 7, 2016 • View on HN

She wrote a book on this topic.http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674032262

cafard • Jul 31, 2017 • View on HN

Well maybe, but see http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm#leonar... from 1873.

benbreen • Dec 15, 2018 • View on HN

That's gwern's specialty. I highly recommend browsing around his site if you haven't before. It's the only thing on the internet that reminds me of a 17th century book in terms of structure (and eccentricity!).