With all that is happening to the book publishing industry, this is an interesting time. It used to be difficult to find such public domain works as R. B. Cunninghame Graham's A Vanished Arcadia: Being Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607 to 1767. Graham cut quite a swath through his time, being the founder of the Scottish Socialist Party, a picturesque Member of Parliament dressed in gaucho garb, and the inspiration for some of George Bernard Shaw's characters and for Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.

Always the incorrigible idealist, Graham was drawn to the history of the Jesuit missions in Paraguay -- a period that even the anti-clerical Voltaire described as one of the golden ages of mankind. Protecting their Guarani Indian charges from slave raids from both the Spanish and the Portuguese, the missionaries built up a civilization isolated from the rest of the world and protected it fairly successfully for a century and a half. As Graham tells it:

For a brief period those Guaranís gathered together in the missions, ruled over by their priests, treated like grown-up children, yet with a kindness which attached them to their rulers, enjoyed a half-Arcadian, half-monastic life, reaching to just so much of what the world calls civilization as they could profit by and use with pleasure to themselves. A commonwealth where money was unknown to the majority of the citizens, a curious experiment by self-devoted men, a sort of dropping down a diving-bell in the flood of progress to keep alive a population which would otherwise soon have been suffocated in its muddy waves, was doomed to failure by the very nature of mankind. Foredoomed to failure, it has disappeared, leaving nothing of a like nature now upon the earth. The Indians, too, have vanished, gone to that limbo which no doubt is fitted for them. Gentle, indulgent reader, if you read this book, doubt not an instant that everything that happens happens for the best; doubt not, for in so doing you would doubt of all you see—our life, our progress, and your own infallibility, which at all hazards must be kept inviolate.

So perhaps the English styling circa 1901 is a little stiff, but Graham very quickly warms to his subject and produces a world-beating study of how human greed, envy, and spite can destroy everything good that man has produced. In this book there are heroes, such as Father Antonio Ruiz Montoya, who is responsible for the missions' founding, and such villains as Bishop Bernardino de Cardenas, Bishop of Asunción, and Don Francisco de Paula Bucareli y Ursua, the Spanish blockhead who finally enforced the expulsion of the Jesuit order from South America.

You may recall a film made in the 1980s called The Mission, directed by Roland Joffe and starring Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons. The script was loosely based on Graham's book and, although it took liberties with the story, was basically sympathetic to the author's feeling for the Jesuits and their Indian charges.

As you navigate the brave new world of closing bookstores, give some thought to the older historians, whose works are now more available (and inexpensive) than ever. I am thinking of writers such as Edward Gibbon (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), Francis Parkman (France and England in North America), Marion Motley (The Rise of the Dutch Republic), William H. Prescott (The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru), and many more besides. R. B. Cunninghame Graham belongs in this talented assemblage.