The Monadnock Valley 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, the Anglosphere, and America.
Why "monadnock"?
In geology, a monadnock (from the Abenaki word 'menadena' for "isolated mountain") is a single remnant of a former highland, which rises as an isolated rock mass above a plain. Likewise, the Monadnock Valley 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 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Willa Cather, and Edwin Arlington Robinson. We endeavor to publish works by these authors and others who are representative of the the Anglosphere and especially America.
In architecture, Burnham & Root's Monadnock Building in Chicago is a fine example of late nineteenth-century architecture at the dawn of the skyscraper. A contemporary said of the Monadnock Building that it "tells its story in the plainest, strongest words and then stops talking"; that is precisely the kind of straightforward approach to publishing that we prefer at the Monadnock Valley Press: a primary dedication to the text itself, without marketing hype or extraneous interpretation.
In literature, architect Howard Roark's Monadnock Valley development in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is described as a set of variations on the theme of "joy and reason and meaning", like a symphony composed by an inexhaustible imagination. Here at the Monadnock Valley Press, we too think that the human mind and imagination are inexhaustible, and we joyously celebrate the meaning of human achievements in literature, philosophy, history, the sciences, and the arts.