About 85 minutes
The Squire's Little Girl — Story, Setting & Ideas
Fantasy Juvenile Worlds
19,505 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #43145
Explore this collection
Start with a reading choice
Three of the shortest recorded reading commitments in this catalog. Times are estimates, not quality ratings.
About 97 minutes
The Children of the Valley — Background and Themes
Fantasy Juvenile Worlds
22,297 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #48167About 104 minutes
Off Santiago with Sampson — A Reader’s Guide
Fantasy Juvenile Worlds
23,858 recorded words. Selected by the catalog's stored reading-time estimate.
View Gutenberg source #43420Search the excerpts stored with this catalog
96 of 96 catalog books have a stored excerpt with a Gutenberg source record. Search covers these excerpts only, up to 6,000 characters per book. A missing match does not mean the phrase is absent from the full work.
Read a catalog excerpt example: The Squire's Little Girl — Story, Setting & Ideas
Susie was a very pretty little girl; she had bright black eyes and a quantity of curling black hair, and her cheeks were rosy like the soft bloom of a peach, and her lips when she opened them showed pearly-white teeth. Phyllis looked right down into Susie's black eyes, and something in her heart stirred, so that the colour suffused her face, and she had difficulty in keeping back her tears. "You are the Rectory children," she said; "please tell me what your surname is." "Hilchester," said Ral…
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Compare two books and their available excerpts
| Book | Recorded words | Estimated minutes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Squire's Little Girl — Story, Setting & Ideas | 19,505 | 85 | Gutenberg #43145 |
| The Children of the Valley — Background and Themes | 22,297 | 97 | Gutenberg #48167 |
| Off Santiago with Sampson — A Reader’s Guide | 23,858 | 104 | Gutenberg #43420 |
How these choices and excerpts are prepared
Choices use stored catalog measurements. Estimates vary with reading speed. A shared category is a catalog label, not a claim that two books have the same argument or literary quality.
Search reads excerpt text stored with this catalog and links to its associated Gutenberg record. The connection is stored in the site database; this tool does not recheck that every excerpt is word-for-word identical to that external record. Excerpt search does not cover every chapter and does not verify historical publication dates.
Catalog snapshot checked: 2026-09-25. Coverage: 96 public books, 96 available source excerpts.
Do more with this book catalog
Welcome to the EMAAF Public Domain Literature Library, a curated digital collection of 96 classic works. The catalog is organized into four thematic areas: Fantasy Juvenile Worlds, Exploration Survival Adventure Tales, Historical Psychological Social Fiction, and Science Fiction Utopias. You can browse these categories or use the interactive tools below to discover books that match your interests.
Each book in this library includes a reader-friendly edition with text sections, word counts, and estimated reading times. The tools on this page help you explore the collection in different ways. Whether you want to find a book by subject, compare two works side by side, or get a sense of how long a book will take to read, these guides are designed to make your browsing easier.
96
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
96
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Book Finder
Search by subject, category, or length to find books that match your reading preferences. The finder filters the catalog based on the details you choose, showing titles that fit your criteria.
Book Compare
Select two books to view a side-by-side comparison of their word count, reading time, sections, and sentence complexity. This helps you understand how the books differ in scope and style.
Reading Time Guide
Estimate how long it will take to read any book using average reading speeds. The guide categorizes books as quick, steady, immersive, or marathon based on their length.
Choosing, Comparing, and Tracking Your Reading
With 96 public-domain titles spread across four categories, the EMAAF library offers more than a casual browse can easily hold. The collection leans heavily on Fantasy Juvenile Worlds, which contains fifty books, while Exploration Survival Adventure Tales holds twenty-two. The remaining two categories, Science Fiction Utopias and Historical Psychological Social Fiction, each hold twelve. That uneven spread means a reader looking for a frontier adventure or a school story will find plenty, but someone seeking a utopian tale will need to search more deliberately.
Three working tools sit beside the catalog to help with that search: Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker. They are not quality meters; they sort, measure, and schedule. Used together, they turn a vague intention into a concrete reading plan.
Start with Finder, Then Compare
Book Finder is the natural entry point because it lets you filter by category, length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, and subject. The catalog's median book runs about 58,500 words, which translates to roughly 255 minutes of reading. Most titles fall into the medium or long length bands, so filters like 'short' or 'epic' quickly narrow the field to a manageable set.
Once Finder returns a handful of candidates, Compare Books steps in. You can line up two or three titles side by side and see their word counts, estimated reading times, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects. This is where the numbers start to matter. For example, Ned in the Block-House: A Tale of Early Days in the West — A Closer Reading sits at 65,533 words with an average sentence of 24.7 words. That sentence length is noticeably higher than many other adventure tales in the catalog, which might affect how quickly you settle into the prose.
Comparing also reveals structural differences that a summary might hide. A book with twenty text sections likely breaks its story into many short chapters, while one with seven sections may offer longer, more sustained reading sessions. Knowing that before you commit can prevent a mismatch between your available reading time and the book's natural pace.
Plan Progress with the Tracker
After you choose a book, Reading Tracker helps you estimate how long the journey will take. It records your progress in pages, not minutes or sections. If the catalog doesn't provide a fixed page count, the tool estimates one by dividing the word count by 250 words per page. You can override that total with the page count from your own edition, which is useful because public-domain reprints often paginate differently.
The tracker also lets you set a daily page goal. The default is 20 pages, but you can adjust it to match your schedule. From there, it calculates estimated remaining time and finish date. For a book like Ned in the Block-House, the initial estimate would be about 262 pages. At 20 pages a day, that's roughly 14 days of reading. If you know you read faster or slower, you can change the goal and see the new estimate immediately.
Your progress history is stored in your browser's localStorage, so you don't need an account to keep track. That means the tracker is best used on a single device unless you are comfortable with the data staying there. The tools work best in sequence: find a few candidates, compare their numbers, then pick one and set a realistic page goal. The catalog is large enough that a little planning goes a long way.