The first heading is “Being”—and beneath it, existence keeps company with “vital principle,” “nothingness,” “moonshine,” and “thin air.” Here, even an idea’s opposites belong in the same search. When Peter Mark Roget published his thesaurus in 1852, he offered a different route through English: not an alphabetical list, but a map of words gathered by meaning. The British physician and lexicographer arranged language into broad classes and clusters, so a writer who knows the thought but cannot find its expression can explore its neighbors—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and turns of phrase together. From the essence of a thing to the ways it may vanish, each entry opens onto a web of associations. What word is waiting at the end of the thought you came here to name? With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world. Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.
