The Squire Press Catalogue

The Forgotten
Classics Library

Curated editions of overlooked masterworks – with fresh design, clean text, original annotations, and modern typesetting for a comfortable reading experience.

Why These Books?

Great Literature That Got Lost

Every title in the Squire Press library was chosen for its genuine literary quality. Not merely old, not merely obscure – but genuinely remarkable, and undeservedly forgotten. Each edition is restored, annotated, and produced to the same standard we apply to client books.

Book cover for A Master of Mysteries by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
Annotated Edition

A Master of Mysteries

L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace  (Authors)

"Six supernatural terrors. Six ingenious explanations."

A circular chamber that kills the men who sleep in it. A coffin that appears to guard its own prison. A railway tunnel where invisible hands work the signals. John Bell has made a profession of walking into such places and refusing the obvious explanation – six cases in which terror, superstition, and apparently impossible crime turn out to conceal ingenious human design.

First published in 1898, A Master of Mysteries is an important early collection of impossible-crime fiction, poised between the Victorian ghost story and the scientific detective tale. This Squire Press edition is set from the Ward, Lock first edition, with a substantial new introduction and fifty-four explanatory notes.

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Book cover for The Thing in the Woods by Harper Williams
Annotated Edition

The Thing in the Woods

Harper Williams  (Author)

"One country doctor. A hill full of secrets. Something moving in the woods."

Dr. Haverill takes over a small country practice in the Pennsylvania hills expecting an easy summer, and finds a neighbourhood running on rumour: a hired man who will not pass a hare on the road, a household the district has quietly stopped speaking to, a cyclist dead on a quiet stretch, and a shape at the edge of the trees that nobody will describe twice.

First published in 1924 under the name Harper Williams, The Thing in the Woods is the work of Margery Williams Bianco – remembered now for The Velveteen Rabbit, and writing here with a hard, unsentimental edge. This Squire Press edition is set from the 1924 first American edition, with a new introduction and forty-five explanatory notes.

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Book cover for The Crack of Doom by Robert Cromie
Annotated Edition

The Crack of Doom

Robert Cromie  (Author)

"One grain of matter. Enough energy to end the world."

Aboard a transatlantic liner, physician Arthur Marcel meets Herbert Brande, whose calm certainty hides a terrible conviction: that matter itself is a mistake, and that the force locked inside the atom could unmake the world. Curiosity draws Marcel into the secretive Cui Bono Society – and toward a remote island in the Arafura Sea where Brande means to prove it.

First published in 1895, Robert Cromie's The Crack of Doom is a startling early work of atomic-catastrophe fiction, written before the discoveries that transformed modern physics. This Squire Press edition restores the text against the 1895 second edition, with Cromie's original preface, a new introduction, and eighteen historical, scientific, and literary notes.

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Book cover for In the Sargasso Sea by Thomas A. Janvier
Annotated Edition

In the Sargasso Sea

Thomas A. Janvier  (Author)

"One castaway. A continent of weed. The lost ships of centuries."

Shanghaied and thrown overboard from a brig running a darker trade than its cargo, young American engineer Roger Stetworth washes into the Sargasso Sea – a vast, weed-bound wilderness where abandoned steamers, vanished warships, and treasure-laden galleons have gathered beyond the reach of ordinary navigation. The graveyard offers food, tools, shelter, and riches beyond measure, but no obvious way home.

First published in 1898, Thomas A. Janvier's In the Sargasso Sea is a gripping maritime Robinsonade of isolation, ingenuity, and survival. This Squire Press edition restores the text against two 1898 Harper & Brothers scans, with a new introduction and eighteen historical and nautical notes.

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Book cover for The Moon Pool by A. Merritt
Annotated Edition

The Moon Pool

A. Merritt  (Author)

"A vanished expedition. A moonlit ruin. A power older than history."

When Dr. Walter T. Goodwin follows a trail of impossible disappearances to the Pacific island of Ponape, he finds more than ancient stones and moonlit water. Beneath the ruins lies a threshold to Muria – a radiant underground realm of beauty, science, tyranny, and ancient terror. At the heart of it waits the Shining One: beautiful, inhuman, and deadly.

First published in book form in 1919, The Moon Pool helped define the borderland between lost-world adventure, weird fiction, and early science fantasy. Most available editions descend from Merritt's later revised text; this Squire Press edition returns to the first G. P. Putnam's Sons hardcover, restoring the original wartime context and the retrospective coda, with a new introduction and thirty-six explanatory endnotes.

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Book cover for Meridiana by Jules Verne
New Translation

Meridiana

Jules Verne  (Author)  ·  Lucian Laurent  (Translator)

"A lost Jules Verne adventure about rival scientists, fragile instruments, imperial war, and the dangerous work of measuring the Earth."

In Meridiana, Jules Verne turns one of the driest-sounding scientific problems imaginable – measuring an arc of the meridian – into a tense adventure of rivalry, endurance, and survival. Three English astronomers and three Russian astronomers set out across southern Africa with delicate instruments and a shared scientific purpose. Then the Crimean War breaks out, and the expedition must decide whether truth can survive when national loyalty turns colleagues into enemies.

Published in 1872, Meridiana belongs to the same vigorous early phase of Verne's career that produced Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days – one of his most unusual adventures, part scientific romance, part wilderness story, and part meditation on whether shared truth can hold men together when war tells them to become enemies. This Squire Press edition presents a fresh translation from the original 1872 French text, with an introduction and historical notes.

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Book cover for Scarlet Sails: A Feerie by Alexander Grin
New Translation

Scarlet Sails

Alexander Grin  (Author)  ·  Lev Lesov  (Translator)

"One of the most cherished fairy tales in Russian literature – a luminous parable of patience, faith, and the courage to believe in wonders."

In the forgotten coastal village of Caperna, a small girl named Assol is told by a wandering storyteller that one day a great ship with scarlet sails will come into the bay to carry her away. The villagers mock her for it. The years pass. She grows into a strange, dreaming young woman – shunned and laughed at – and somewhere out on the open sea, a young captain named Arthur Gray hears of her dream and quietly decides to make it come true.

First published in 1923, Alexander Grin's Scarlet Sails is one of the most beloved works in modern Russian literature – a feerie, in his own word, of yearning, dignity, and the stubborn persistence of beauty in a hostile world. This Squire Press edition presents a fresh English translation by Lev Lesov, restoring the cadence and lyricism of Grin's prose for a new generation of readers.

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Book cover for Black Magic (Annotated) by Marjorie Bowen
Annotated Edition

Black Magic

Marjorie Bowen  (Author)  ·  Jack Elmy  (Editor)

"Gothic historical fiction of rare intensity – morally serious, atmospheric, and driven by characters who feel genuinely dangerous."

In medieval Bruges, a young painter named Theirry falls under the influence of Dirk Renswoude – a brilliant, coldly driven student of the black arts who believes that will and knowledge, pushed far enough, can break the laws of God and nature. Together they move through the courts, universities, and shadowed back-rooms of a medieval Empire, each pursuing an obsession that will cost more than either can imagine.

Written when Marjorie Bowen was a teenager and published in 1909 to immediate acclaim, Black Magic is a work of extraordinary precocity. Graham Greene named Bowen the most important early influence on his career. This Squire Press edition restores the full, uncut 1909 text – compressed in the 1922 reprint – with an original introduction and scholarly endnotes illuminating the alchemical practices, medieval geography, and period detail that give the novel its texture.

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Book cover for Olesya by Alexander Kuprin
New Translation

Olesya

Alexander Kuprin  (Author)  ·  Jack Elmy  (Translator)

"One of the great forgotten masterworks of Russian literature – a story of passion and exile, tenderness and tragedy, as alive today as when it was written."

Deep in the forests of Ukraine, a young nobleman encounters Olesya – a mysterious woman who lives apart from the world with her grandmother, feared by the local villagers as a witch. What begins as curiosity deepens into an intense and impossible love, set against a landscape of superstition, cruelty, and wild beauty.

Kuprin's luminous novella has been too long overlooked in English – a story of passion and exile, tenderness and tragedy. This fresh translation restores the full power of Kuprin's prose for the modern reader, free from the archaic diction that has weighed down earlier English versions.

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Book cover for The Lost Stradivarius by John Meade Falkner
Annotated Edition

The Lost Stradivarius

John Meade Falkner  (Author)

"One of the great neglected ghost stories of the Victorian era – restored and annotated for the modern reader."

When an Oxford undergraduate discovers a hidden Stradivarius violin sealed behind a panel in his college rooms, he awakens something that should have stayed buried. The instrument is exquisite – and it is not alone. A dark presence follows it, reshaping the young man's mind and will, drawing him toward ruin with the slow, irresistible pull of the sea.

Falkner's novella is a masterpiece of atmospheric dread and psychological deterioration – precise, literary, and genuinely unsettling. This Squire Press edition includes historical and musical notes that illuminate Falkner's meticulous period detail and the real traditions of supernatural folklore woven throughout.

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Book cover for Belshazzar: A Novel by H. Rider Haggard
Annotated Edition

Belshazzar: A Novel

H. Rider Haggard  (Author)

"A sweeping historical tale of war, prophecy, and devotion, set against one of history's most dramatic moments."

In the final days of Babylon, as the armies of Cyrus gather at the gates, a young soldier named Ramose is swept into the heart of an empire in collapse – and into the orbit of Belshazzar, the last king, whose fate was written in fire on the wall of his own palace. H. Rider Haggard's final novel is a magnificent closing statement: intimate in its characterisation, vast in its scope.

This Squire Press annotated edition includes historical and biblical notes illuminating the real world behind Haggard's fiction – from the archaeology of ancient Babylon to the Book of Daniel itself, and the historical figure of Cyrus the Great.

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Book cover for The Sweetheart: A Play in Four Acts by Eugène Brieux
New Translation

The Sweetheart

Eugène Brieux  (Author)  ·  Jack Elmy  (Translator)

"A lost masterpiece of French theatre – published in a new English translation for the first time."

In a Parisian hat shop where dreams are stitched from silk and secrets, the price of love is devastatingly high. Behind the elegant façade of a bustling turn-of-the-century millinery, spirited shopgirl Marguerite and idealistic heir André fall into a forbidden love affair. But when a secret pregnancy comes to light, their private world collides with the brutal machinery of bourgeois morality.

This vibrant new translation resurrects Brieux's forgotten classic for a modern audience, asking a question as relevant today as it was over a century ago: in a world determined to crush them, what is the ultimate cost of a love that dares to exist? Published here for the first time in English.

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Book cover for The Castle of the Carpathians by Jules Verne
New Translation

The Castle of the Carpathians

Jules Verne  (Author)  ·  Jack Elmy  (Translator)

"A mesmerising tale – part gothic mystery, part proto-science fiction, set in the haunted forests of Transylvania."

What hidden secrets lurk within The Castle of the Carpathians? Jules Verne's tale takes you deep into the mysterious heart of Transylvania, where an ancient castle – long abandoned and feared by locals – suddenly stirs back to life. When a plume of smoke rises from its towers, the peaceful village of Werst is thrown into chaos. Is it haunted by restless spirits, or is something far more sinister unfolding?

This special edition has been enhanced for the modern reader, featuring a brand-new translation, a detailed study guide with a glossary of terms, and insightful new footnotes that illuminate Verne's blend of gothic tradition and technological imagination – the two forces that define his finest work.

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Our Edition Standard

What Makes a Squire Press
Edition Different

Clean, Restored Texts

We work from the best available source texts, correcting errors that accumulated over generations of reprinting and restoring cuts made by later editors.

Original Scholarship

Every annotated edition includes a newly commissioned introduction and footnotes written by our editors – not recycled from earlier editions.

Modern Typesetting

Set from scratch in a book-design application, not reformatted from a public domain scan. Comfortable to read, properly spaced, and correctly hyphenated.