About Read-a-Book

Read-a-Book began in 2011, in a small attic in Edinburgh, as a Sunday-evening mailing list of three friends recommending one book each to the other two. Today it is an independent online library of just under three thousand carefully chosen titles — and a very small press of our own.

We believe a library should feel like a library: quiet, generous, and a little opinionated. Every book here has been read by a human being who could tell you, in a sentence, why it earned its place on the shelf.

You can read any title in your browser, with proper typography and pages that turn the way pages should, or download a clean, typeset PDF to take with you. There are no accounts, no advertisements, and no trackers. There never will be.

A note on the type

The body of this site is set in Cormorant Garamond, with display lines in Playfair Display. We chose them because they remember, gently, that the page existed long before the screen.