Merkaba Press imprint: 261 books

The story opens with Ishmael, his family, Ellen and Abiram slowly making their way across the virgin prairies of the Midwest looking for a homestead, just two years after the Louisiana Purchase, and during the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They meet the trapper (Natty Bumppo), who has left...

There appears to be a settled belief, quite general in its expression, that the character of a daughter derives from the father rather than from the mother. Fathers, surely, enjoy this conceit; but Isabella of Castile, whom the historians of Spain denominate Isabel la Catolica, affords a noble exception. From...

This volume of short stories contains five of G.A. Henty's classic tales: "Bears snd Dacoits," "The Paternosters," "A Pipe of Mystery," "White-Faced Dick," and "A Brush with the Chinese."

The cellar resembles a cave, with only one small window to illuminate its dank recesses. In a corner, thin boards partition off the room of Vaska, the young thief. In the kitchen live Kvashnya (Dough), a vendor of meat pies, the decrepit Baron, and the streetwalker Nastya. All around the room are...

In this collection of essays, published in 1909, Bierce offers his incisive and sardonic commentary on many social issues of the day. He proffers arguments that are still in use by today's pundits, making his essays such as “The Game of Politics," “The Death Penalty," and “The Right to Work," seem surprisingly modern.

In a certain town in Persia there lived, once upon a time, two brothers. Their names were Cassim and All Baba, and when their father died all he had was divided between them, so they both started life with the same fortune. But before very long Cassim married a rich wife, and Ali Baba married...

The Alchemist is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy.

            WHILE WORKING FOR THE LAST nine years at the History of the Peninsular War, I have (as was inevitable) been compelled to accumulate many notes, and much miscellaneous information which does not bear upon the actual chronicle of events in the various campaigns that lie between...

THERE WAS A TIME, NOT so very long ago, when the taunt was true that history was written as if it were a mere string of anecdotal biographies of great men. But for the last forty years the pendulum has been swinging so much in the other direction, that it has become necessary to enforce the lesson...

Arthur Schopenhauer may be distinctively described as the greatest philosophic writer of his century. So evident is this that he has sometimes been regarded as having more importance in literature than in philosophy; but this is an error. As a metaphysician he is second to no one since Kant. Others...

Baruch de Spinoza was born into the Jewish community of Amsterdam on November 24, 1632. His parents were Jews who had fled, along with many others, from the vicious intolerance of the Inquisition to the limited and hesitant freedom of Holland. At the time Spinoza was born, the Jewish refugees had...

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne, on June 19, 1623. He sprung from a well-known legal family, many members of which had held lucrative and responsible positions. His father, Etienne Pascal, held the post of intendant, or provincial administrator, in Normandy, where, and at Paris...

                The present volume is concerned with that period in the history of the Scandinavian peoples when they were growing, but had not yet fully grown, into nationalities, and when, therefore, their true national history had not begun. Every historic people has passed through...

The war of the United States with Mexico awakened the military ardor of American citizens, which had been slumbering since the contest with Great Britain in 1812-14. It stirred their imagination with the romance which has ever been connected with the scenes of Spanish conquest, heightened by the strange...