The Short Stories of H. G. Wells, in e-book formats for your pleasure

It’s Free Book Fri… no, Saturday! Today’s book is a fantastic collection of short stories by one of the fathers of science fiction, H. G. Wells. Here’s the info; the link is at the bottom of this post.

I ran across a digital copy of The Short Stories of H. G. Wells at Project Gutenberg Australia, but it needed some fixing up. So I did the following:

• Cleaned up the HTML
• Changed over all straight apostrophes & quotation marks to their curly equivalents
• Converted any special characters (em dashes & ellipses, for instance) to their UTF-8 equivalents
• Found the original cover
• Added a table of contents
• Converted the HTML to EPUB using Pandoc
• Converted the EPUB to MOBI using Calibre
• Converted the HTML to PDF using Pandoc
• Added all the books to Calibre
• Added the correct metadata to the Calibre entry for the book, including a description

Here’s the description¹:

Published by Ernest Benn Ltd. in 1927, The Short Stories of H. G. Wells is not a complete collection of the writer’s short fiction (even though it clocks in at well over 1000 pages!). Featuring 62 stories (about two-thirds of his output) and the world-famous novella “The Time Machine,” this anthology contains most of the short works that Wells is remembered for today.

The Short Stories of H. G. Wells is divided into sections that correspond to previously published collections of Wells’ stories.

• The Time Machine and Other Stories: This is not a previously-published book, but is instead a collection assembled for this book. Besides the ground-breaking “The Time Machine,” seven of Wells’ other stories are here, including “The Empire of the Ants,” “The Door in the Wall,” and “The Country of the Blind.”

• The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories: Originally published as The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, these 15 stories were originally published between December 1893 and March 1895. Key stories are “A Deal in Ostriches,” “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist,” “The Lord of the Dynamos,” and “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.”

• The Plattner Story and Others: Includes stories originally published in a collection of the same name, plus five additional stories. Famous works include “The Red Room,” “The Argonauts of the Air,” “The Apple,” and “A Slip Under the Microscope.”

• Tales of Time and Space: Five science fiction stories that first appeared in a collection of the same name. “The Star” is great, and “The Crystal Egg” has inspired writers for generations, but this also includes two longer works: “A Story of the Stone Age” and “A Story of Days to Come.”

• Twelve Stories and a Dream: 13 stories from the eponymous collection, including “The Truth About Pyecraft,” “Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation,” “The Magic Shop,” and “The Inexperienced Ghost.”

I’m providing a download of the exported Calibre entry for the book, which will import right away into Calibre. If you don’t have Calibre, you should be able to just pick the format you want & use that with your e-book reader of choice.

The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)

Happy reading!