What a delightful thing Clive Thompson (one of Boing Boing's regular contributors) has created! It's called Weird Old Books, and it is a search engine that returns one pre-1927 book based on your search term.
He wrote about it on Medium:
When I first starting crafting this, I had two design specs:
1) Immediate access
I wanted a tool that would only find you books in the public domain. That way you could begin flipping through the whole book immediately. No "snippet view." Got a five-minute break from work? In a few seconds you can be peering at a nutty old book. I wanted instant gratification. So that meant sticking to books published before Jan. 1, 1927.
2) Only one result
This search tool would return only one book at a time. Why? I wanted to avoid the paradox of choice, where we get frozen when we're confronted with too many options.
