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The Reader, by Alexander Ver Huell, c. 1880

About Us

The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need.  When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ."  If  it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.

Book of the Month -- March  2023

Out of the Hurly-Burly, by Max Adeler

Out of the Hurly-Burly
Charles Heber Clark, though almost forgotten today, was a very successful humourist of the last half of the 19th-Century. Out of the Hurly-Burly was his most successful work, selling upwards of a million copies, and is entirely typical of the funny papers of the period. The episode of the Department of Obituary Poetry is one of the high spots of C19th  facetiousness. The illustrations, too, of which there are nearly 400, are some of the first works of Artghur B. Frost, and worth the price alone.

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Max Adeler contemplating the Patent Office Report, by Arthur B. Frost

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