By Robert Louis Stevenson (Author), LLoyd Osbourne (Author), Colin Heston (Editor)

The Wrecker, co-written by Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, is a globe-trotting mystery and adventure novel centered around the mysterious fate of a derelict ship found in the South Seas. The story follows Loudon Dodd, an idealistic artist turned reluctant adventurer, as he unravels the secrets of the wrecked ship Currency Lass. Combining elements of detective fiction, satire, and romance, the novel explores themes of ambition, identity, and the illusion of fortune. Set against a backdrop of San Francisco, Paris, and the Pacific Islands, it presents a vivid and at times ironic portrait of late 19th-century capitalist enterprise and artistic struggle. This novel is taken from The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson VOL. XIII. This volume has been carefully edited and redesigned by Colin Heston, renowned novelist and story writer, to make the book more comprehensible to the present-day reader.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Australia-Philadelphia. 2025. 269p.

By Robert J. Hendricks

A FEW families near the then struggling town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1844 went to the wilderness of Missouri and began building Bethel, founded upon the principle of property and labor in common. They adopted a constitution. They brought into community use money, livestock, machinery, implements and tools to the value of $30,802.75. Most came empty handed. They held to- gether under their original leader slightly more than thirty-three years. In that time they built four towns; they sent five covered wagon companies across the plains, and about a hundred members by way of Panama. They paid back in money the original amounts contributed, and they had left to divide among themselves about 23,500 acres of land and the mills, shops, stores and other personal property of three towns, worth at present day prices about three million dollars. They paid their taxes

The Press of the Pioneers: New York, 1933, 353p.

By Charles Dickens.

Dickens traveled to America in 1842 and wrote letters home to his friend John Forster. These were published in a book in the same year. It was not received well because of his criticism of American manners, slavery, and the American press.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1842) 240 pages.