Skip to content
Gems Press

Gems Press

Books Worth Remembering

  • Books Worth Remembering from Gems Press
  • Classic True Stories
  • Books to Read Free
  • Selected Graphics
  • Shop
  • Toggle search form
Dick Clark’s Third Wife Kari Explains How Their Marriage Works

Dick Clark’s Third Wife Kari Explains How Their Marriage Works

“Our love comes from friendship, our sex is sex. Plain old sex. Our sex doesn’t involve love and that’s how we like it.”

stories
From India to the Planet Mars

From India to the Planet Mars

Since the spiritualist movement in France explicitly supported the rebirth doctrine, French psychics and trance mediums often tended to claim recollections about their past existences. Few researchers took such statements seriously until the 1890s, when Catherine Elise Mueller, a trance medium in Geneva, Switzerland, came into prominence with her reincarnation claims….

stories
Beethoven’s Personality Remembered as Lacking

Beethoven’s Personality Remembered as Lacking

One or two years later I was living with my parents during the summer in the village of Heiligenstadt, near Vienna. Our dwelling fronted on the garden and Beethoven had rented the rooms facing the street. Both set of apartments were connected by a hall in common which led to the stairs. My brothers and I took little heed of the odd man who in the meanwhile had grown more robust, and went about dressed in a most negligent, indeed even slovenly way, when he shot past us with a growl. My mother, however, a passionate lover of music, allowed herself to be carried away, now and again….

stories
Jane Smiley on  Baths

Jane Smiley on Baths

Once I ran away from my boyfriend to a hotel. I wouldn’t let my friends tell him where I was, and between baths I made calls to those in the know to find out what his reaction was and how it was progressing. There were some strains in our relationship, but mostly I thought that running away was a dramatically artistic thing to do. I planned to work every moment on a passionately intense but enigmatic story I was writing about my sexual and emotional history….

stories
Groucho on How Harpo Got (and Got Back) His Harp

Groucho on How Harpo Got (and Got Back) His Harp

“As far back as I can remember, my grandmother and grandfather lived with us in whatever Yorkville flat we happened to be occupying at the time. They had been performers in Germany — he a ventriloquist and she a harpist who yodeled while plucking the strings.”

stories
Dazed But Not Confused: Tales of a Wilderness Wanderer • by Kevin Callan

Dazed But Not Confused: Tales of a Wilderness Wanderer • by Kevin Callan

Borrow for free. Kevin Callan shares dozens of intriguing and often very funny tales in this ebook of wilderness camping stories.

books
Keep an Eye on That Foot

Keep an Eye on That Foot

FOOT SHOW
Meaning: Insult.
Action: A sitting or reclining person shows the sole of his shoe to his companion.
Background: In certain countries, if this is done accidentally, it can cause serious trouble. People have even been murdered for showing the sole of a shoe to someone….

stories
Brian Wilson’s Sandbox

Brian Wilson’s Sandbox

Brian and Marilyn Wilson move out of their rented apartment in Gardner Street, West Hollywood, and take up residence at their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in an expensive area of Beverly Hills. Shortly after the couple moves in, Brian hires a carpenter to build a wooden box in the dining room….

stories
Marlo Thomas at Age Twelve: Viva Today!

Marlo Thomas at Age Twelve: Viva Today!

When I was twelve, I wrote an essay in school called “Viva Today.” It was about how everyone was so busy working for tomorrow, that they sometimes forgot about living their lives today. I used my father [Danny Thomas] as an example. “He’s always away, working hard to make a better tomorrow for his children,” I wrote, “but when he finally comes home for good, we’ll probably be grown and gone.” And I ended with the words, “So, I say, Viva Today!” A few nights later, our parents made their daily call to us from the road….

stories
Zanies: The World’s Greatest Eccentrics • by Jay Robert Nash

Zanies: The World’s Greatest Eccentrics • by Jay Robert Nash

Borrow for free. The dozens of profiles of great eccentrics include many well-known people such as W.C. Fields, Henry Ford, J. Edgar Hoover, Nikola Tesla, and Edgar Allen Poe, along with people you’ve never heard of who have done zany things, such as Matthew (Lord Rokeby) Robinson, who spent every day, from dawn to dusk, immersed in the sea.

books
Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lifelong Secret

Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lifelong Secret

Just as her career was well under way, Dorothy faced a dreadful personal crisis. Biographical sketches published during her lifetime mention that she and her husband had an adopted son whose name was John Anthony Fleming. At her death her public learned a little more about him because he was her sole heir, apart from her old friend and literary executor Muriel St. Clare Byrne. Dorothy and her husband had unofficially adopted Anthony when he went to boarding school.

stories
Psychiatrist Brian Weiss Accidentally Accesses Patient’s Past Lives, Blows Mind

Psychiatrist Brian Weiss Accidentally Accesses Patient’s Past Lives, Blows Mind

“Catherine was a patient who was referred to me about a year after I had become Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, Florida. In her late twenties, a Catholic woman from New England, Catherine was quite comfortable with her religion, not questioning this part of her life. She was suffering from fears, phobias, paralyzing panic attacks, depression, and recurrent nightmares. Her symptoms had been lifelong and were now worsening.”

stories
Picking Sunflowers That Aren’t Quite Ready

Picking Sunflowers That Aren’t Quite Ready

“I want to go back to my parents. My grandmother explains that the Warsaw ghetto will soon be liquidated, perhaps within days. There is an ambulance going back to Warsaw, and I can go if I really want to.”

stories
Are You Anybody? Conversations with Wives of Celebrities • by Marilyn Funt

Are You Anybody? Conversations with Wives of Celebrities • by Marilyn Funt

Borrow for free. A collection of interviews with wives of celebrities, focused on the challenges of being in a marriage with someone who’s much more celebrated than you are, but covering a lot of interesting territory.

books
Jacques Vallée and the Story of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Jacques Vallée and the Story of the Virgin of Guadalupe

An incident occurring at daybreak, on Saturday, December 9, 1531, in Mexico, [represents] the culmination of all the superstitions we have discussed. Of tremendous sociological and psychological impact, it has left physical traces that can still be seen — and, indeed, are still an object of much devotion — today. On that long-ago morning, a fifty-seven-year-old Aztec Indian whose Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle and whose Spanish name was Juan Diego was going to the church of Tlaltclolco, near Mexico City. Suddenly he froze in his tracks as he heard a concert of singing birds, sharp and sweet. The air was bitterly cold: no bird in its right mind would sing at such hour, and yet the harmonious music went on….

stories
Scandals

Scandals

As you might expect, there is no shortage of books about scandals. Here are some that are less tawdry yet still compelling.

books
Applying the Rejuvenating Cautery

Applying the Rejuvenating Cautery

At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, it was found that if red hot irons were placed to cool on a man’s back, certain phenomena were to be noted. The monks, the scientific men of that day, occasionally made records of their conclusions as to this process. Some valuable data no doubt has been lost, but enough remained when that Frenchman, Paquelin, made his exhaustive study of the subject to result in the cautery named for him.

stories
Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds • by Jacques Vallée

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds • by Jacques Vallée

Borrow for free. Jacques Vallée is the French scientist that the character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based on. For decades, he has been looking at the UFO phenomenon from a radically different perspective from the mainstream, and this book is a collection of accounts of incidents involving extra-terrestrial visitations throughout history.

books
Ernest Hemingway’s African Accidents

Ernest Hemingway’s African Accidents

Hemingway had decided, with all good intentions, to give his wife a belated Christmas present. He rented a Cessna 180 and hired a bush pilot named Roy Marsh to fly them over some scenic African sights. They would see Lake Albert and the spectacular Murchison Falls where the Nile River falls through a rock cleft and descends into cascading pools of water several hundred feet below. Mary Hemingway shot roll after roll of film as the bush pilot circled the falls several times. Suddenly, a flight of ibis, birds with long legs and long curved bills, flew in front of the plane….

stories
Angela Carter on the Poète Maudit

Angela Carter on the Poète Maudit

“Her books (‘South American Magic Realism,’ she murmurs almost disparagingly — ‘nowadays everyone seems to be at it’) are full of fairly innocent girls who suffer at the hands of Bluebeard or The Beast, or the alarming owner of an extraordinary toy shop. In her stories the woman is frequently the victim, fearful only that she may enjoy that condition too much.”

stories
The Best Way to Learn a Language

The Best Way to Learn a Language

The best way to learn a language, I’d heard, was to have an affair with a native speaker, one who didn’t speak English. Clearly, I needed a new approach and this one did have a certain sex appeal. I gave it a try. He was, I recall, rather cute — tall, blond, soulful eyes. Perhaps not an intellectual powerhouse, but given our linguistic limitations, I had no way of knowing. I wasn’t even sure of his name. I’m sure he’d told me, but I’d forgotten. By the time I knew it was a name I should know, it was rather too late to inquire. I rummaged through the papers on his desk and found both Alain Chausse and Chausse Alain, but neither had commas.

stories
The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 • edited by Sid Holt

The Best American Magazine Writing 2011 • edited by Sid Holt

Borrow for free. This collection of two dozen articles and stories is made up of finalists and award-winners of the National Magazine Awards, including pieces by Paul Theroux, Barbara Kingsolver, and Christopher Hitchens.

books
Jack Proves His Mettle

Jack Proves His Mettle

“The captain and mate were seeing to it that the crew should not get away…. The captain’s boat was hoisted on board every evening, and the oars put away. There was also a night-watchman, who had two guns strapped around him, but did not look fierce to correspond. Being a Frenchman, and rather religious, I doubted if the necessity could arise to make him shoot to kill. Liverpool Jack and I held a conference, and decided that the time was near to make a dash for freedom.”

stories
Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg at the Villa Medici, Rome 1967

Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg at the Villa Medici, Rome 1967

Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim…. We lived together in this magnificent palace, the Villa Medici, with its formal gardens, one of the most elegant buildings in the world, that Stash had managed to pull off. His father, Balthus, had an apartment there, some diplomatic role via the French Academy, which owned the building. Balthus was away, so we had his place to ourselves.

stories
Two Mother-Related Excerpts Touching on Sarah Bernhardt’s Temperament

Two Mother-Related Excerpts Touching on Sarah Bernhardt’s Temperament

“When Sarah was born on October 23,1844, Judith was only 16 years old. A beautiful girl with a lovely face and figure, Judith had been a milliner before arriving in France to seek her fortune. Perhaps she could have become a governess or a seamstress, but she thought either option was too dull and poorly paid.”

stories
Cartoon Collections

Cartoon Collections

While a few are brilliant, most single-panel cartoons don’t strike me as being funny or clever, and judging from the cartoon collection books I’ve found on the Internet Archive, they were even less so in olden days. Still, I could be wrong. And also I did have fun browsing through these books.

books
Lift Your Hoofs and Let ‘Em Fall!

Lift Your Hoofs and Let ‘Em Fall!

Even if you have never swung a partner to a stamping fiddler’s call, it is not hard to imagine a square dance, that exuberant American social occasion in calico and straw. The caller was the most important part of the dance, for it was he who got folks on their feet and made them mix. Many a romance has started from the clever calls of the fiddler who kept a sharp eye out for matchmaking. Here are some of his lively directions. You supply the music and the dancing and see whom you end up with!

stories
Rooster Tips

Rooster Tips

First things first: as a chicken rancher, you do not need a rooster in order for the hens to lay eggs. Hens lay eggs nearly daily for most of the year, in accordance with the length of the day (i.e. waxing in spring and waning in winter). The only thing a rooster can do that is useful to humans is to fertilize the eggs if you’d like to have chicks. Fertilized eggs have no more nutrients than unfertilized eggs. Notice that I wrote the only “useful” thing. Just about everything else a rooster does is completely obnoxious….

stories
Michael Pollan’s Food Rule #46

Michael Pollan’s Food Rule #46

Stop eating before you’re full. Nowadays we think it is normal and right to eat until you are full, but many cultures specifically advise stopping well before that point is reached. The Japanese have a saying — hara hachi bu — counseling people to stop eating when they are 80 percent full. The Ayurvedic tradition in India advises eating until you are 75 percent full; the Chinese specify 70 percent, and the prophet Muhammad described a full belly as one that contained 1/3 food and 1/3 liquid — and l/3 air, i.e., nothing.

stories
Alexander McKaig Hangs Out with Fitz and Zelda

Alexander McKaig Hangs Out with Fitz and Zelda

“April 12 . Called on Scott Fitz and his bride. Latter temperamental small town Southern Belle. Chews gum — shows knees. I do not think marriage can succeed. Both drinking heavily. Think they will be divorced in 3 years. Scott write something big — then die in a garret at 32.”

stories
Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet • by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith

Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet • by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith

Borrow for free. “The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. It also means defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking, but it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.”

books
Costa at His Most Typical

Costa at His Most Typical

There was one particular incident, which occurred after about a fortnight when we had reached Auzou in northern Chad, which showed Costa [Achillopoulo] at his most typical. When we travel in exotic lands, we nearly all of us run up sooner or later with the problem of the uninhibited onlookers — usually in the form of a group of locals who materialise from nowhere, take up a position a yard or two away and stare and stare, fascinated by one’s every action. Even on picnics, this technique can be unnerving enough; but at a night camp, where there are no tents to afford the minimum of privacy and not even any bushes for cover, it can become a serious matter.

stories
Anjelica Huston Meets Jack Nicholson, 1973

Anjelica Huston Meets Jack Nicholson, 1973

A Swedish friend of Cici’s, Brigitta, who owned Strip Thrills, a dress shop on Sunset, told her that she was going to a party at Jack Nicholson’s house that evening and invited her to come along. Cici asked if she could bring her stepdaughter, and Brigitta said fine, that it was his birthday, and Jack loved pretty girls….

stories
Jahanara Romney Talks About Women’s Lib at the Hog Farm

Jahanara Romney Talks About Women’s Lib at the Hog Farm

“Most of the 60s in my memory is like one long blur of trying to cook dinner from the inside aisle of a moving bus with pots and pans tied onto it.”

stories
I, Fellini • by Charlotte Chandler

I, Fellini • by Charlotte Chandler

Borrow for free. “Everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that,” says film director Federico Fellini. “No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision.”

books
Light Show Report, 1966

Light Show Report, 1966

“This LIGHT SHOW MANUAL is a ‘HOW TO DO IT’ report based on personal experience and observations of the author over the past decade. A major adjunct to psychedelic ‘happenings,’ rock-and-roll performances, ‘in’ parties, and ‘turn- on’ scenes are the color effects grouped under the heading of ‘light shows.’ This imaginative use of color and light expanded greatly in the psychedelic scene, adding much to trips festivals, ‘GUAMBOS’ (Great Underworld Artist’s Masked Balls and Orgies), ‘freak-outs,’ and futuristic night clubs.”

stories
Aggressive Dressing for Feminists

Aggressive Dressing for Feminists

“I started a book about aggressive dressing, which I think is a little bit different than power dressing. This is dressing to intimidate, to get what you want. It’s feminism but in a different vein. I conceived of the idea of kind of making this book like a military manual, so I called it The F-100. It took situations and then gave you ideas for appropriate dress for each, based upon the premise that you’re trying to gain an edge over the situation, an opponent, or simply another person.”

stories
One of Davy Crockett’s Many Brushes with Death

One of Davy Crockett’s Many Brushes with Death

The next fall after this marriage, three of my neighbours and myself determined to explore a new country. Their names were Robinson, Frazier, and Rich. We set out for the Creek country, crossing the Tennessee river; and after having made a day’s travel, we stop’d at the house of one of my old acquaintances, who had settled there after the war. Resting here a day, Frazier turned out to hunt, being a great hunter; but he got badly bit by a very poisonous snake, and so we left him and went on. We passed through a large rich valley, called Jones’s valley, where several other families had settled, and continued our course till we came near to the place where Tuscaloosa now stands. Here we camped, as there were no inhabitants, and hobbled out our horses for the night. About two hours before day, we heard the bells on our horses going back the way we had come, as they had started to leave us….

stories
Greg Dobbs in a Beirut Coffee Shop

Greg Dobbs in a Beirut Coffee Shop

It was just a coffee shop with half a dozen customers, none of whom seemed to even glance up at my arrival. I took a seat in a small booth with my back to the wall. This meant I could keep an eye on the parking lot and see who drove up. I had not watched all those spy movies for nothing. While I was keeping my vigilant eyes open for anything untoward, someone sat down beside me. I mean, this guy with a brown leather briefcase just materialized out of nowhere, set the briefcase under the table, and sat down beside me….

stories
Joan Rivers on the Challenges of Getting Old

Joan Rivers on the Challenges of Getting Old

“One of the saddest times in Rivers’s life since I have known her was when her best friend Tommy Corcoran died a few years ago. Rivers spoke to him three times a day, and he walked Melissa down the aisle at her wedding.”

stories
Eric Clapton Learns the Truth

Eric Clapton Learns the Truth

My mum had six sisters, Nell, Elsie, Renie, Flossie, Cath and Phyllis, and two brothers, Joe and Jack, and on a Sunday it wasn’t unusual for two or three of these other families to show up, and they would pass the gossip and get up to date with what was happening with us and with them. In the smallness of this house there were always conversations being carried on in front of me as if I didn’t exist, and there were whispers exchanged between the sisters. It was a house full of secrets. But, bit by bit, by carefully listening to these exchanges, I slowly began to put together a picture of what was going on….

stories
Charlie Barnet Gets to Play Saxophone

Charlie Barnet Gets to Play Saxophone

…That was in 1929 and I went home to New York for the Christmas vacation. New York looked even better to me than before and I hated the idea of returning to the Middle West, so on the way back I got off the train in Albany and spent the night there. In the morning, I took another train back to New York, and got a room in a fleabag hotel. The Elk, on West Fifty-third Street and Seventh. I sent my mother a letter telling her not to worry and then set out to find a job.

stories
Beer Drinking and Evolution

Beer Drinking and Evolution

The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol. In a community lacking pure-water supplies, the closest thing to “pure” fluid was alcohol. Whatever health risks were posed by beer (and later wine) in the early days of agrarian settlements were more than offset by alcohol’s antibacterial properties.

stories
Charles Demers Explains His Panic Attacks

Charles Demers Explains His Panic Attacks

“Complaining alternately of light-headedness or chest pains, I visited the ER more often than most people see their GPs (probably more than most people see their parents). Incidentally, besides my socialism, my hypochondria is one of the reasons I never complain about kicking in tax dollars to pay for universal health care; I’ve had cardio stress tests that turned out to be for little more than my undershirt being on backwards.”

stories
Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties • by Lisa Law

Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties • by Lisa Law

Borrow for free. Lisa Law is a skillful interviewer who brings out the shining personalities and wild reminiscences of these counterculture trailblazers, as she talks to them about the 60s.

books
Alfred Hitchcock as a Boy: He Smelled of Fish

Alfred Hitchcock as a Boy: He Smelled of Fish

Alfred Hitchcock explained once that ‘I was terrified of the police, of the Jesuit fathers, of physical punishment, of a lot of things. This is the root of my work.’ The remark has a further application. He once said that ‘I spent three years studying with the Jesuits….

stories
Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess

Risk Taking and Attractiveness in Chess

[Excerpt from the paper by Anna Dreber, Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gransmark, Stockholm School of Economics and Stockholm University (published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2013)] We explore the relationship between attractiveness and risk taking in chess. We use a large international panel dataset on high-level chess competitions which includes a control for the players’ skill in chess. This data is combined with results from a survey on an online labor market where participants were asked to rate the photos of 626 expert chess players according to attractiveness.

stories
Moss Hart’s Aunt Kate Goes Too Far

Moss Hart’s Aunt Kate Goes Too Far

“The trip was not without fateful consequences of its own. My mother and father met in London — he followed her to America a year later. And on my Aunt Kate the trip produced so profound an impression that she never recovered from it for the rest of her life.”

stories
Surfer Kary Mullis Enjoys Winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Surfer Kary Mullis Enjoys Winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry

“I was confident I was going to receive the Nobel Prize in 1992 …. I was very excited. And I was actively humble. As it turned out, I had good reason to be humble. I didn’t win.”

stories
Pattie Boyd’s Sibling Rivalry

Pattie Boyd’s Sibling Rivalry

An early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling [my little brother] Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed….

stories
Carl Jung’s Near-Death Experience

Carl Jung’s Near-Death Experience

[Carl Jung died of a heart attack in 1944, only to be brought back to life. This is an excerpt from his experience.] As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me — an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me.

stories
Lorraine Snyder Testifies at Her Mother’s Trial

Lorraine Snyder Testifies at Her Mother’s Trial

It was a long day in court, with much happening before the defense for Mrs. Snyder rested and the defense of Gray began with the immediate production of Henry Judd. Out of the dark tangles of this bloody morass there stepped for a brief moment a wraith-like little figure all in black — Lorraine Snyder, the nine-year-old daughter of the blond woman and the dead art editor. She was, please God, such a fleeting little shadow that one had scarcely stopped gulping over her appearance before she was gone. She was asked just three questions by Hazleton as she sat in the big witness chair, a wide-brimmed black hat shading her tiny face, her presence there, it seemed to me, a reproach to civilization.

stories
Stephen Fry Discovers Oscar Wilde

Stephen Fry Discovers Oscar Wilde

“One Sunday afternoon, aged twelve, while my father was safely at work in the stable block ‘over the way’, I watched on the little television Anthony Asquith’s film version of The Importance of Being Earnest. I vividly recall sitting on an uncushioned wooden kitchen chair, face flushed, mouth half-open, simply astonished at what I was watching and, most especially, hearing.”

stories
Enough Rope: Poems • by Dorothy Parker

Enough Rope: Poems • by Dorothy Parker

Borrow for free. Dorothy Parker is famous for her wit, and her poems are thoroughly enjoyable despite her tendencies towards doomed love affairs, depression, and cynicism.

books
Abe Lincoln Gets Some Good Advice

Abe Lincoln Gets Some Good Advice

Lincoln always took great pleasure in relating this yarn: Riding at one time in a stage with an old Kentuckian who was returning
from Missouri, Lincoln excited the old gentleman’s surprise by refusing to accept either of tobacco or French brandy….

stories

The Cost of Respectable Traveling

…From all this one may conclude that the equivalent of four hundred pounds a year was the minimum for respectable travelling [circa 1600] and that the Average Tourist would certainly need at least half as much again. But this is assuming that all who were respectable, or above the need to be so, paid all their own expenses, which was far from being the case…

stories
Your Whole Group Is Annoyed and Disgusted

Your Whole Group Is Annoyed and Disgusted

On Monday I walked into the office laden with gifts and called out, “Ohaiyo gozaimasu. Good morning.” Instead of the usual responses, there was dead silence. No one would answer me; everyone looked displeased with me. I asked Takagi-san what the problem was. “It would be better if you spoke to Kamakura-san,” he said, curtly. I turned to Kamakura-san. “Is there something wrong?” He stared at me with disdain. “You have committed a grave transgression. How could you have done such a thing?” I was mystified. “What did I do?”

stories
The Sun Also Rises • by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises • by Ernest Hemingway

You can borrow and read The Sun Also Rises free. Ernest Hemingway can write, no doubt about it. The Sun Also Rises was his first novel, and by all accounts it was a huge struggle for him, requiring lots of drafts and rewriting, but he does seem to have gotten it right.

books
Adventurer Freya Stark’s Autobiography in Four Volumes

Adventurer Freya Stark’s Autobiography in Four Volumes

First, here’s a summary of Freya Stark’s life, so you can see if you want to read about her adventures in detail.

books
Wilbur Wright Gets the First Flying Machine Ready for Market

Wilbur Wright Gets the First Flying Machine Ready for Market

While our patent application was pursuing its slow course through the Patent Office, we built a second machine and flew it in a field near the city of Dayton, Ohio, in the summer and autumn of 1904. When we had familiarized ourselves with the operation of the machine in more or less straight flights, we decided to try a complete circle. At first we did not know just how much movement to give in order to make a circle of a given size. On the first three trials we found that we had started a circle on too large a radius to keep within the boundaries of the small field in which we were operating….

stories
Langewiesche’s Sensible Use of Language

Langewiesche’s Sensible Use of Language

“The crash. I crashed because I was stupid and because I was smart. The stupid part is this: I chose a bad day to fly. The wind was from the wrong direction and I took off with a high wind to my back.”

stories
Why Gracie Allen Used Two Roast Beefs

Why Gracie Allen Used Two Roast Beefs

George Burns and Gracie Allen evolved into one of the most popular radio teams of the 1930s. By the end of the decade, however, Burns began noticing an alarming change: Our ratings kept dropping I’m in bed one night, two in the morning, and it finally hit me: I said, “We are too old for the jokes we’re doing.” We were married and on the air we were single…. So I woke up Gracie. I says, “Kid, I got it.”

stories
Mandala Books You Can Borrow

Mandala Books You Can Borrow

Mandalas are widely known as symbols that assist with meditation and concentration, but there are complexities and profundities of meaning, if you want to dig a little deeper.

books
What to Expect from Hostelries When Traveling During the Roman Empire

What to Expect from Hostelries When Traveling During the Roman Empire

After Augustus became emperor in 27 B.C., the Romans established the Cursus Publicus, or the imperial post system, to move the emperor’s mail and officials speedily around the empire. Scattered along the Roman roads were various inns that provided officials with food, lodging, and a change of horses. The Latin word for these inns was tabera, from which is derived the modern word tavern.

stories
How to Love Yourself

How to Love Yourself

World-changing advice: Be your own best friend. Love yourself unconditionally. All of these books about how to love yourself are good, in different ways. They take varying approaches. You might like to browse through and see if anything calls to you.

books
Rodney Dangerfield Is Born

Rodney Dangerfield Is Born

I was doing better as a comedian the second time around. I was older and wiser, yeah, but I was funnier, too. I was really working hard on my jokes, and polishing all that material I’d stored in that duffel bag for twelve years. My timing was better, my jokes were better, and my name was better. Yeah, I was no longer Jack Roy. One of the biggest changes I’d made in my act was my name. Early in my comeback, I visited a club I’d worked at years before, hoping I could get booked there because I’d been one of their favorite comics. I hadn’t worked there in quite a while, though, and the club had new owners….

stories
A Morbid Taste for Bones • by Ellis Peters

A Morbid Taste for Bones • by Ellis Peters

Borrow for free. The first volume in the 20-book Brother Cadfael medieval murder mystery series. The Prior of Shrewsbury Abbey in 12th-century Shropshire, England, wants the abbey to acquire a saint’s bones for the chapel there, so as to encourage pilgrimages and thus increase glory and earnings. When he can’t find a saint available locally, he travels to Wales to disinter Saint Winifred….

books
Uncovering the Prehistoric British Isles Through Language Sound Change

Uncovering the Prehistoric British Isles Through Language Sound Change

All languages change with the passage of time; sometimes a mysterious change overtakes the pronunciation of a particular sound in all the words of a language; such a change is called a ‘Sound Change’. Anybody who has learned more than one European language will have noticed certain similarities of form in words of the same or similar meaning. English acre, for instance, and Latin ager, a field. The words for mother and father, likewise, resemble each other in many languages. Careful comparison of Indo-European languages with each other makes possible the definition of sound changes which took place in the course of their divergence from each other….

stories
Maximize Your Self-Esteem

Maximize Your Self-Esteem

The Internet Archive offers lots of self-esteem books to borrow. Here are some of my favorites. They offer a variety of ways of looking at, and achieving, a healthy relationship with yourself.

books
Tim Cahill Trains for a Road Race

Tim Cahill Trains for a Road Race

“The first thing I’d say about hand-to-hand combat, having seen you guys,” Graham said, “is to avoid it at all costs.” Good thinking there, Graham, I thought. “But if you do need it to get out of some situation, forget everything you thought you knew about fighting and go for the eyes. Poke, scratch, anything. This isn’t the movies and it’s not a fair fight. Do it fast, do it unexpectedly, and inflict pain. People can’t focus on hands coming for the eyes. Even you guys might have a chance.”

stories
Marley Eats Grilled Cheese

Marley Eats Grilled Cheese

It didn’t matter how much food Marley devoured, either through legitimate means or illicit activities. He always wanted more. When deafness came, we weren’t completely surprised that the only sound he could still hear was the sweet, soft thud of falling food. One day I arrived home from work to find the house empty. Jenny and the kids were out somewhere, and I called for Marley but got no response. I walked upstairs, where he sometimes snoozed when left alone, but he was nowhere in sight. After I changed my clothes, I returned downstairs and found him in the kitchen up to no good. His back to me, he was standing on his hind legs, his front paws and chest resting on the kitchen table as he gobbled down the remains of a grilled cheese sandwich. My first reaction was to loudly scold him. Instead I decided to see how close I could get before he realized he had company.

stories
Lynn Barber on Marianne Faithfull

Lynn Barber on Marianne Faithfull

When I get back, [David] Bailey is at the camera; Marianne, in a black mac and fishnet tights, is sprawling with her legs wide apart, her black satin crotch glinting between her scrawny fifty-five-year-old thighs, doing sex-kitten moues at the camera. ‘Oh please, stop!’ I want to cry — this is sadism, this is misogyny, this is cruelty to grandmothers. I wonder if Bailey actually hates her — I wonder if this is her punishment for turning up late. I hear the agent and the Frenchman muttering behind me: ‘They won’t use this, they can’t.’ So why is Bailey shooting it then?

stories
Typical Morning Reported by Explorer Robert Dunn

Typical Morning Reported by Explorer Robert Dunn

July 3 [1903]. — Not a wink, sleeping by the burning stump. Its heat drew the ‘skeets, and the old punk blazed up like a blast-furnace, nearly finishing my horse-blankets. Packed at last, and with the sun shining, we jumped right into rotten luck. At a big stream, the brown horse branded B refused to take the trail we’d cut through the alder jungle, and jumped in up to his neck — three times. Once, four beasts together followed him, wetting their packs, too, carried downstream and mixed up in snags and swift water, till the game seemed up. Twice I plunged in to my eyes and soaked my camera. Jack and I sweated like crazy men, and only King came back to help. No sooner were the four on the trail, than we hit a sheer alder slope, and chopped upward. It was too steep for the poor Whiteface, who staggered over backwards and rolled to the bottom, caught on his back in the vicious stems. When roped out, repacked, and hauled up the bank, both hind legs limped. His back can’t stand much more.

stories
Pole-Vaulting for Profit

Pole-Vaulting for Profit

Ukrainian pole-vault star Sergei Bubka had a lot of record-setting vaults during the 1990–91 season. Bubka, a wise businessman, had a clause written into his contract with a shoe company that called for him to earn a bonus each and every time he bested the indoor and/or outdoor pole-vault records. Sergei managed to eclipse the…

Read More “Pole-Vaulting for Profit” »

stories
Maeve Binchy, Avid Eavesdropper

Maeve Binchy, Avid Eavesdropper

Maeve’s new column would be described as ‘a veritable psychopathology of everyday life’. It could have been conducted simply as a series of interviews. Instead, she took any opportunity she could find for eavesdropping on her subjects. She began listening in to people’s conversations in restaurants, on buses, wherever she found herself. She even admitted to getting off a bus and pursuing two people down the street because their conversation hadn’t finished. The No. 73 bus was a favourite vehicle….

stories
Marie Antoinette Gives Birth

Marie Antoinette Gives Birth

…Here were born her four children. Here she came near dying, December 20, 1778, when bringing her first daughter, the future Duchess of Angoulême, into the world. Custom demanded numerous witnesses at a sovereign’s lying-in. An ancient and barbarous etiquette authorized the people to enter the King’s palace under such circumstances. From early morning the approaches to the château, the gardens, the galleries of the Mirrors and the Oeil-de-Boeuf, the Salons, and the very chamber of the Queen, had been invaded by an indiscreet and noisy crowd. Ragged chimneysweepers climbed upon the furniture and clung to the draperies….

stories
The Norton Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day • edited by Christopher Silvester

The Norton Book of Interviews: An Anthology from 1859 to the Present Day • edited by Christopher Silvester

Borrow for free. Over 80 interviews with people prominent in fairly recent history: Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Mao Tse-Tung, William Burroughs, Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Groucho Marx….

books

Posts pagination

Previous 1 2

*As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Sign up for our mailing list and get a free PDF of the first 70 pages of the Gems Press book, Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems: The Best of Early English Wit.*

About Gems Press

Contact us at contact (at) gemspress.earth

Copyright © 2025 Gems Press.

Powered by PressBook Masonry Blogs