Dot Books.

Genre

Essays.

From the quiet self-reliance of Emerson to the profound meditations of Marcus Aurelius, this shelf gathers the essays that have shaped how we think and live. Whether you're drawn to the sharp cultural criticism of Du Bois or the playful wisdom of Montaigne, these books reward patient minds. A haven for lovers of ideas, language, and the endlessly curious.

49 books · page 1 of 2

Classics

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

A Roman emperor's private reflections on power, mortality, and inner freedom.

Print · PDF

From $7.50

Essays

The Humbugs of the World

by P. T. Barnum

P.

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Classics

Imaginary Conversations and Poems

Walter Savage Landor's celebrated prose dialogues, in which historical and legendary figures meet across the centuries to argue, reflect, and confide, gathered here with a selectio

$7.50

Classics

The Republic of Plato

by Plato

Plato’s great dialogue on justice, education, power, and the shape of an ideal city remains one of the defining books of political thought.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Biography & Memoir

The Romance of Biography (Vol 1 of 2): or Memoirs of Women Loved and Celebrated by Poets, from the Days of the Troubadou

The first volume of a nineteenth-century study of the women who inspired the poets: portraits of the muses and beloveds celebrated in verse, from the age of the troubadours onward.

$7.00

Essays

Jewish Literature and Other Essays

A collection of essays surveying the richness of Jewish literary and cultural history, from the scholarly pen of Gustav Karpeles.

$7.00

Art & Design

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete

by Leonardo da Vinci

The gathered notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, a dazzling record of one of history's greatest minds at work.

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Essays

Studies in Literature and History

A collection of literary and historical essays, ranging across authors, ideas, and eras with the reflective breadth of a cultivated critical mind.

$7.00

Essays

Daily stories of Pennsylvania : $b prepared for publication in the leading daily newspapers of the state

A collection of short stories about Pennsylvania, originally prepared for publication in the state's leading daily newspapers, offering brief tales drawn from its people, places an

$8.00

Essays

The Journal to Stella

by Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift's intimate letters to Esther Johnson, written from London during his years at the heart of politics.

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Essays

Hobson-Jobson

The famous Anglo-Indian glossary that traces how words like bungalow, shampoo, curry and pyjama passed from India into English, part dictionary, part treasure-house of colonial enc

$8.00

Essays

The Communist Manifesto

by Marx and Engels

The short, incendiary pamphlet by Marx and Engels that reframed history as a struggle between classes.

Print · PDF

From $5.00

Classics

Microcosmography

A witty gallery of English character sketches from the early seventeenth century, portraying types high and low with sharp observation and dry humour.

$7.00

Biography & Memoir

A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

Louise Imogen Guiney's A Little English Gallery gathers graceful literary portraits of Lady Danvers, Henry Vaughan, George Farquhar, Beauclerk and Langton, and William Hazlitt.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Nature

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson's founding essay of American Transcendentalism, arguing that the natural world is the visible face of spirit.

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Essays

Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence

A landmark anthology of speeches and orations by Black Americans, gathering the great voices of abolition, uplift, and civil rights in a testament to African American eloquence and

$7.00

Essays

Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients

by Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon's celebrated Essays paired with his Wisdom of the Ancients, gathering some of the shrewdest prose in English.

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Essays

Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures delivered at Columbia University

by Edward MacDowell

Edward MacDowell's lectures on music, delivered at Columbia University, in which the celebrated American composer reflects on the history and meaning of his art with a practitioner

Print · PDF

From $7.00

Essays

Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

A gathering of Emerson's essays, the works that carried American Transcendentalism to the world.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Pascal's Pensées

by Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal's unfinished masterpiece: fragments toward a defence of faith by one of history's great mathematical minds.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

The Book-Hunter

A witty, affectionate celebration of book collecting and the peculiar breed who pursue rare volumes.

$8.00

Essays

Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete

by Michel de Montaigne

The complete essays of Montaigne, the writer who invented the form: a lifelong, endlessly curious inquiry into himself and, through himself, into what it means to be human.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical

Anna Jameson's pioneering nineteenth-century study of Shakespeare's heroines, examining the women of the plays, from Portia and Juliet to Lady Macbeth, as fully realized characters

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays

by Goldman, Emma

Emma Goldman's bracing collection of essays on anarchism, freedom, and the questions of her age.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

The Philippines a Century Hence

José Rizal's searching essay on the future of his colonised homeland.

$8.00

Essays

The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

William James's spirited defense of the right to believe where evidence runs out, gathered with other essays in his lucid, humane philosophy.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Love and Freindship [sic]

Jane Austen, barely a teenager, takes a scalpel to the sentimental novel.

$8.00

Essays

Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre

by De Cleyre, Voltairine

A gathering of the essays, poems and lectures of Voltairine de Cleyre, one of American anarchism's most eloquent voices.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Essays on the Latin Orient

A historian's studies of the Crusader and Latin states of the medieval eastern Mediterranean, examining the Frankish rulers, islands and principalities of a fascinating borderland.

$9.00

Biography & Memoir

Biographia Literaria

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's landmark of literary autobiography and criticism, blending the story of his intellectual life with profound reflections on poetry, imagination, and philos

Print · PDF

From $8.50

Art & Design

The Crown of Wild Olive: also Munera Pulveris; Pre-Raphaelitism; Aratra Pentelici

A gathering of John Ruskin's lectures and essays on work, wealth, art, and honor.

$8.00

Art & Design

Rambles of an archæologist among old books and in old places : $b Being papers on art, in relation to archæology, painti

A genial Victorian collection of papers on art, archaeology, and antiquity, wandering among old books and old places: essays on how art and everyday life illuminate the past.

$8.00

Essays

The Love Letters of Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn

A king's own hand, unguarded and impatient: the surviving letters Henry VIII wrote to Anne Boleyn as desire, dynasty, and the fate of a church all began to gather around a single c

$8.00

Classics

Plutarch's Morals

Plutarch's wide-ranging essays and dialogues on how to live, think, and govern oneself.

$8.00

Biography & Memoir

De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s long prison letter turns suffering, memory, vanity, love, humiliation, and spiritual reckoning into one of the most searching autobiographical works in English.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Southern Literature From 1579-1895

A wide-ranging anthology of writing from the American South across more than three centuries, gathering poetry, prose and historical documents to trace the literary voice of a regi

$9.00

Biography & Memoir

Napoleon's Letters to Josephine, 1796-1812: For the First Time Collected and Translated, with Notes Social, Historical

The private letters of Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine trace one of history's most famous relationships from passionate ardor to estrangement, offering an intimate view of the empe

$8.00

Biography & Memoir

The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay

by Mary Wollstonecraft

The intimate letters of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to her American lover Gilbert Imlay.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

The Federalist Papers

by Hamilton, Madison, Jay

The foundational essays by Hamilton, Madison and Jay, written to defend the proposed United States Constitution.

Print · PDF

From $5.00

Classics

Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

by Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau's two great works together: the record of his experiment in simple living by Walden Pond, and his ringing argument for conscience over unjust law.

Print · PDF

From $5.00

Essays

A Modest Proposal: For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or countr

by Swift, Jonathan

Jonathan Swift's ferocious 1729 satire, straight-faced and monstrous, coolly proposing that the poor of Ireland sell their children as food.

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

by Tobias Smollett

Tobias Smollett's comic epistolary masterpiece sends a cantankerous squire and his household on a rollicking tour of eighteenth-century Britain, told through their clashing letters

Print · PDF

From $8.00

Essays

Mosses from an Old Manse

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne's rich short-story collection gathers dark allegories and moral fables from his years in a Concord parsonage, probing sin, obsession and the shadowed corners of

Print · PDF

From $7.50

Essays

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa's fragmentary masterpiece gathers the musings of a Lisbon clerk into an unclassifiable anti-novel, a shimmering diary of solitude, dream and the strangeness of simp

$18.50

Essays

A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid's blistering book-length essay turns the tourist's gaze back on itself, laying bare the wreckage of colonialism and corruption in her native Antigua with unforgetta

$12.50

Biography & Memoir

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson's genre-crossing memoir braids queer love, pregnancy and gender transition with sharp philosophical inquiry, making a fierce, tender case for a life that refuses easy

$15.95

Essays

The Souls of Black Folk

by W. E. B. Du Bois

W.

Print · PDF

From $5.00

Classics

Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s 'Beyond Good and Evil' is a searing critique of morality, truth, and power that refuses to offer easy answers.

Print · PDF

From $5.00