Bartleby

Free literature online. That would be the simple way of summing up Bartleby, but it doesn't go anywhere near to describing the wealth of information available. There are more than thirty reference texts, including thesauri, quotations, dictionaries, books on usage, mythology. There are a further seventeen collections of verse and almost thirty writers of verse can be accessed individually, from Virgil and Shakespeare to TS Elliot and Siegfried Sassoon. There's also a huge selection of titles in the Fiction section. Authors from Aristophanes to Agatha Christie have at least one of their works available for you to read online. Then there are lots of non-fiction, letters, papers and essays. You would need reinforced bookshelves at home to carry all these tomes. There are also daily and weekly features.


The site is extremely user friendly. The four sections above are navigated using the four drop-down boxes towards the top right of the home page or by clicking the four grey tabs in the title bar. Some of the most popular titles have independent links as well, running down the column beneath the drop down-boxes. Everything has links to further areas of interest, and if you can't find exactly what you want, try the search engine at the very top of every page.


SPECIAL FEATURES


Reference Some of the worlds most famous texts are here, in their entirety and for free. The World Fact Book. The Bible. The Oxford Shakespeare. Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body. Roget's Thesauri. The Elements of Style. And there's more. All the texts are very easy to browse. Simply choose from the options each new page presents until you get to exactly what you want.


Verse Absolutely free collection of verse from some of the world's greatest poets. Dozens of Anthologies and Volumes to read online.


Fiction Huge collection of whole texts of some of the world's most famous books. Great as a reference tool, or just to while away an evening or more, reading some classic fiction. For free, obviously.



Nonfiction With a slight leaning toward American works, this section is no less impressive than the rest of the site. Darwin's Origin of the Species sits quite comfortably alongside The Sayings of Confucius. Dozens of these titles are ones you meant to read but never got around to. Now you have no excuse.