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Users share links to digitized rare books, historical documents, and literary references from archives like Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and academic libraries, often discovered via random searches or bibliographic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

📉 Falling 0.4x Other
2,731
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#6015
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
1
2008
9
2009
33
2010
51
2011
41
2012
51
2013
68
2014
87
2015
127
2016
147
2017
157
2018
167
2019
200
2020
226
2021
253
2022
281
2023
339
2024
252
2025
220
2026
21

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!).