Every time you open the app the top of this page brings you a tale to tell tonight. Below it, a fresh row each day — a line, a quick quiz, a fable, a great work, a stand, one colossal ambition. The whole shelf sits under that.
The Greeks and Romans did something with their children that we have largely stopped doing: they told them, over and over, about people who did great things. Not to entertain them. To give them models, and to expect them to be copied. Plutarch said plainly that he wrote his Lives so that a young man reading them would be provoked into imitation.
That is the whole aim here. Courage, cunning, loyalty, mercy, endurance, the will to build — shown by people who actually had them, told in the storyteller's voice rather than a lecturer's. The tales are not commentary and they do not moralise. They carry their own weight.
Five shelves. The hero tales and the fables are public-domain stories from the great 19th-century tellers. Great works is things built — the canal, the bridge, the cable, the dome — because the men who drove those through were as hard as any soldier and almost nobody tells their story. The stands are defences and daring, weighted toward the ones left out of the usual books. And Great Ambitions is the colossal, audacious undertakings — cities raised from marsh, seas moved, countries made — where the achievement and the cost are both enormous and both are told in full. The same events read as triumph or tragedy depending on where you stand; a fair test is whether life actually got better for the people who lived it. You weigh it and decide.
Your shelf, your call. Anything you do not want in the house — tap Put away on it and it is gone from every list. Nothing is locked in.
Today
Hero tales
All tales →One tale from each corner of the world today. Swipe along.
Fables
All fables →Two minutes each. Three for today.
Great Works
All →Things built — the canal, the bridge, the cable, the dome.
The Stands
All →Defence, endurance and daring — the ones not in every book.
Great Ambitions
All →The most colossal things people ever set out to do. Achievement and price, both told — you weigh them.