Life would be boring if we couldn't sneak off from work now and then, and do something just for the fun of it. So we've made virtue of necessity and give these things to you out of our own free will. Well, yes, we'd like it if you went back and bought some of our e-books; but you don't have to do that in order to look at our "just for fun" pages.

When everybody read fiction magazines instead of watching television, the letter columns helped readers and fans find each other. Frederick L. Allen, famous for his popular histories, read the "Swap" column in one adventure-type pulp and wrote this piece for HARPER'S MAGAZINE in 1922. [New addition to our collection: 15 July 2003.]

Books without paper? How about a prediction from ... 1894! That's not a typo. Read about it in "The End of Books", a surprising preview of a possible future, with text by Octave Uzanne and wonderful illustrations by Albert Robida (in French, with English summary). As seen in "IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications" for May/June 2000! Now also a Gutenberg Project HTML e-text (Etext 2820).

NEW! The ultimate deconstruction of the "Spanish Prisoner" scam, as written hilariously by Arthur Train for the March, 1910 issue of THE COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE. You may know this particular fraud by the Internet-age name "419," or "Nigerian Letters," but it's still the story of huge riches locked away inaccessibly to everyone but ... you ... if you'll only invest up front.

We travel a good bit (a lot of it selling people on e-books and the concept of e-books) and when we're not traveling we like to read about travel. So we sponsor a website devoted to the history of travel, from contemporary accounts. Go there and you'll see what we mean. For example, you can ride the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1901: an e-coffee-table-book in HTML.

Or you can find out more about Burton Holmes, the man who took the photographs and made travel lectures a tradition. We're so fascinated with BH that we set up a tribute site and registered a domain for him. No charge.

And how about this: Hidden Knowledge is sponsoring a virtual museum of American magazine cover illustration, 1800-1950. There are several hundred cover images up there right now, with thousands more to come in the full passage of time. You can get to it by going to www.MagazineArt.org There isn't anything quite like it anywhere else on the web.

We give these to the Web, in the hope that people will support them by buying our e-books.

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