The Reading Room
Old books that still argue well, free to read. Each one gets a short introduction and a note on which printing the text follows.
The books
| Book | Author | First published | Why read it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte | Richard Whately | 1819 | Hume’s rules for doubting miracles, turned on a man who was still alive |
| Orthodoxy | G. K. Chesterton | 1908 | A critic dared him to state his philosophy, and it turned out to be the Apostles’ Creed |
| Eugenics and Other Evils | G. K. Chesterton | 1922 | A Christian case against the eugenics movement. This page links to a free copy. |
Where these came from
From 2010 to 2017, this address was home to the Apologetics Library of Athanatos Christian Ministries, a free collection of classic apologetics texts.12 Other sites still link to its old pages, and those old addresses now lead here.
How the texts are set
Spelling and punctuation stay as printed, including each author’s dashes and British spellings. Each page names the printing it follows, the scans it was compared with, and anything I corrected.
These books are in the public domain in the US, which covers anything published before 1931.3
Sources
- Athanatos Christian Ministries, “Projects and Services,” accessed Nov. 1, 2026. ↩︎
- Internet Archive, capture of the old apologeticslibrary.com, May 22, 2013. Working captures run from March 2010 to May 2017. ↩︎
- Peter B. Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain,” Cornell University, updated January 1, 2026. ↩︎