The Monadnock Press is an online publisher of public domain texts that reflect our vision of humanity at its best, with a special focus on the classics of Western civilization and the Anglosphere.
Why "monadnock"?
In geology, a monadnock is a single remnant of a former highland, which rises as an isolated rock mass above a plain. Likewise, the Monadnock Press publishes public domain texts that continue to stand out long after their contemporaries have been worn down by the forces of time. We focus especially on classic texts that illustrate the bedrock principles of Western civilization: freedom of thought and action, respect for the individual, the gradual and communal search for truth, scientific and historical objectivity, practical reason, personal and societal enlightenment, and the permanent Renaissance of exploration and innovation.
In history, the eponymous Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire was considered a "new Olympus" that inspired a number of significant writers and artists during and after the American Renaissance, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and Willa Cather. We endeavor to publish works by these authors and others who are representative of the most significant subculture of Western civilization: the Anglosphere.
In architecture, the Monadnock Building in Chicago is a fine example of late nineteenth-century architecture before the dawn of the skyscraper. A contemporary of architect John Root said of the Monadnock Building that it "tells its story in the plainest, strongest words and then stops talking"; and that is precisely the kind of straightforward approach to publishing that we prefer at the Monadnock Press: a primary dedication to the text itself, with minimal marketing hype or extraneous interpretation.
In literature, Howard Roark's Monadnock Valley development in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is described as a set of architectural variations on the theme of "joy and reason and meaning", like a symphony composed by an inexhaustible imagination. Here at the Monadnock Press, we too think that the human mind and imagination are inexhaustible, and we joyously celebrate the meaning of human achievements in the realms of literature, philosophy, history, the sciences, and the arts.