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  The Richest Man in Babylon

  George S. Clason

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  Beloved by millions, this timeless classic holds the key to all you desire and everything you wish to accomplish. This is the book that reveals the secret to personal wealth.The Success Secrets of the Ancients—An Assured Road to Happiness and ProsperityCountless readers have been helped by the famous "Babylonian parables," hailed as the greatest of all inspirational works on the subject of thrift, financial planning, and personal wealth. In language as simple as that found in the Bible, these fascinating and informative stories set you on a sure path to prosperity and its accompanying joys. Acclaimed as a modern-day classic, this celebrated bestseller offers an understanding of—and a solution to—your personal financial problems that will guide you through a lifetime. This is the book that holds the secrets to keeping your money—and making more.The Richest Man in BabylonRead it and recommend it to loved ones—and get on the road to riches.MORE THAN TWO MILLION BOOKS SOLD

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Charlotte Riddell, Thomas Hardy,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  The Right Hand of Doom

  Robert E. Howard

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  Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American author who wrote weird fiction and terrifying horror stories.The Right Hand of Doom features one of his most fascinating characters, the puritan Soloman Kane. Kane is staying at an inn where in the taproom a braggard is boasting about having brought the evil necromancer Roger Simeon to justice.Simeon is to be hanged the next day. The necromancer has vowed revenge on the man who betrayed him...and that night, Kane is awakened by strange sounds in the room next to his in the inn. He goes to investigate and witnesses a scene more terrible and bizarre than anything he could ever have imagined....

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  The Terror of the Machine

  Henry Ford

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  In this autobiography, the American industrialist Henry Ford wrote, 'Repetitive labor… is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind… but to other minds, perhaps I might say the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.' Pushing the 'efficiency of movement' system of Frederick Winslow Taylor to its ultimate realization, Ford tirelessly toiled to reduce factory and assembly line work to its essential operations. This, in turn, reduced factory workers to automatons, seemingly nothing more than extensions of the machines for which they labored. Ford was not bothered by the prospect of reducing people to machines, since he firmly believed that it did not bother them and that they could do no better. But, paradoxically, and like all the great American industrialists, Ford feared the prospect that these 'mindless automatons' might get organized and demand their rights. So along with efficiency of movement came a system of indoctrination and punishment to insure that workers obeyed orders. In short, the industrialized west was built on the systematic oppression of its working people.

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  Christmas Carol A (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens' most loved books - a true classic and a Christmas time must-read. Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to show him the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, Scrooge learns to love Christmas and the people all around him.With a light-hearted introduction by bestselling author Anthony Horowitz, creator of the highly successful Alex Rider

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  Much Ado About Nothing

  William Shakespeare

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  Much Ado about Nothing is generally considered one of Shakespeare's best comedies, because it combines elements of robust hilarity with more serious meditations on honor, shame, and court politics.
  
  The play includes two quite different stories of romantic love. Hero and Claudio fall in love almost at first sight, but an outsider, Don John, strikes out at their happiness. Beatrice and Benedick are kept apart by pride and mutual antagonism until others decide to play Cupid.
  An Author's Republic audio production.

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