Public Domain Recommendations

[AdamMudman]

Hello everyone! Sometime at the end of this year my partner and I are going to start working on a mutual project of reprinting public domain books. Some reprints of books like 19th Century penny dreadfuls are scans, meaning they're hard to read, and the covers on a lot of reprints are generic plain-color backgrounds--so we plan to clean up the texts, give them individual covers, and do introductions, footnotes, and even bonus sequel stories and the like as backup features, and release them with Createspace.

With that explanation out of the way, I guess I want to know: if you could have a fiction piece back in a good-looking edition, what would it be? It would have to be in the public domain or else have no copyright, and we're trying to aim for stuff that's not "big name" like Jane Austen or Charles Dickens. Works by female writers, LGBT writers, writers of color, disabled writers, etc. who have been overlooked by history are more than welcome! And we definitely lean towards the speculative fiction side.

So far we're thinking:

• Vull the Invisible, a dime novel about a criminal with an invisible helmet
• Zalma, Victorian novel about a female anarchist terrorist
• The Shadow of the Czar, Edwardian historical romance thriller (I have selfish reasons for this one)
• The Blue Dwarf, penny dreadful with Dick Turpin
• The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, medieval travelogue with fantastic elements
• The Ferocious Fern, a fantasy anthology (?) about killer plants
• The Star-Rover, Jack London's sci-fi novel, suggested by @BAYLOR
• The Sorceress of the Strand, about which I know little (one of the recommendations pulled from Jess Nevin's Fantastic Victoriana site)
• The Wandering Jew, the Eugene Sue one, also from Nevins (almost 1,500 pages!!)
  
• The Monk, by Gregory Lewis*
• The Blazing World, by Margaret Cavendish

I also have the idea of doing collections of lesser-known stories by authors famous for one character or story--Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction that doesn't involve Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger, or Brigadier Gerard, for example. Thoughts?

* This one is pretty easily available but when I told my partner about some of the happenings in it she really liked how it sounded.

 

[BAYLOR]

Quite a list.

 

[Stuart Suffel]

I'd ask @Victoria Silverwolf for an input, if I were you.