The Prince and the Pauper

A wager in a London club, 80 days, every transport invented by 1872. Verne turns a bet into the most efficient adventure novel ever written.

Jules Verne

Ahab wants the white whale, the whale wants nothing. Long, strange, obsessive, and one of the most quoted American novels ever written.

Herman Melville

A runaway boy and an escaped slave float down the Mississippi. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from this book.

Mark Twain

Captain Nemo, the Nautilus, and a tour of the ocean floor decades before submarines existed. Pure 19th-century wonder.

Jules Verne

A Baltimore gun club decides to shoot a manned projectile at the Moon. Published a century before Apollo 11, with eerie predictions.

Jules Verne