# Humphrey's Lab > Humphrey's Lab is a publishing studio based in Matakana, New Zealand. It offers manuscript analysis, EPUB production and print interior formatting for independent authors, editors and small publishers, along with a small catalogue of revised public domain classics. Humphrey's Lab is not a template generator or an automated conversion tool. Every manuscript is handled individually, and every deliverable is checked before it ships. Prices are fixed and shown openly, work is sold once per manuscript, not as a subscription. ## Services - Lab Report (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/lab-report): a 22-section craft and readability analysis of a manuscript, delivered as a self-contained HTML file. - Ebook (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/ebook): manuscript conversion into a validated, accessible EPUB 3.3 file, ready for every major retailer. - Bindery (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/bindery): print interior formatting for a chosen trim size, delivered as a press-ready PDF/X-4 file. ## Libraria A small, curated shelf of public domain classics, revised by hand for readability and sold as EPUB editions. Structured data for every current title is also available at https://www.humphreys-lab.com/llms.json. ## The Range-Boomer Author: W.C. Tuttle ISBN: 978-1-0673072-5-7 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/tuttle-range-boomer The Range Boomer is a classic Western adventure by W. C. Tuttle, one of the finest storytellers of the American frontier. Set in a world of cattle ranches, dusty trails, quick wits, and quicker tempers, the novel combines action, humour, and memorable characters in a story that never takes itself too seriously. When old feuds, shifting loyalties, and unexpected dangers collide, ordinary people find themselves tested in ways they never expected. Tuttle balances tense confrontations with dry humour, creating a story where courage matters, but common sense often matters more. Behind the gunfights and cattle country lies a portrait of a changing West. The frontier is still wild, yet law, order, and modern life are beginning to leave their mark. Tuttle captures this moment with warmth, sharp dialogue, and an eye for the small details that bring both the landscape and its people to life. First published in 1925, The Range Boomer remains an entertaining example of the classic American Western. It offers fast paced storytelling, colourful characters, and a welcome reminder that a good tale never grows old. ## The Hampdenshire Wonder Author: John D. Beresford ISBN: 978-1-0673108-1-3 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/beresford-hampdenshire-wonder When an extraordinary child is born in the quiet English village of Hampdenshire, his remarkable intelligence quickly attracts the attention of scientists, educators, journalists, and the public. What begins as a local curiosity soon becomes a national sensation. As the child grows, his abilities challenge accepted ideas about intelligence, education, and human development. First published in 1911, "The Hampdenshire Wonder" is an early science-fiction novel that combines social satire with speculation about the future of humanity. ## Erewhon Author: Samuel Butler ISBN: 978-1-0673072-3-3 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/butler-erewhon First published in 1872, Erewhon is Samuel Butler's best known novel and one of the most unusual works of Victorian literature. It is part travel story, part satire, and part philosophical experiment. The novel follows a young traveller who discovers a remote country where almost everything is turned upside down. Illness is treated as a crime, crime is treated as an illness, and machines have been banned for fear that they may one day overtake humanity. Butler uses Erewhon to question the beliefs and habits of his own society. Religion, education, justice, technology, and progress all come under his sharp and often wicked scrutiny. Funny, strange, and remarkably modern, Erewhon is both an entertaining adventure and a serious challenge to the idea that civilisation always knows what it is doing. ## The Secret Agent Author: Joseph Conrad ISBN: 978-1-0673072-2-6 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/conrad-the-secret-agent Despite its title, The Secret Agent is not a conventional spy novel. Its focus is not espionage itself, but the people drawn into its orbit. His characters are not heroes or master criminals. They are ordinary men and women whose choices carry unexpected consequences. Set in London at the beginning of the twentieth century, the novel explores radical politics, surveillance, family life, and the uneasy relationship between private loyalty and public duty. Conrad avoids spectacle. Drama emerges through conversation, silence, and the slow realisation that small decisions can have lasting effects. Readers expecting a fast moving thriller may be surprised. Those willing to follow Conrad's careful prose will discover one of the most thoughtful and rewarding novels of its time. ## Alice in Wonderland Author: Lewis Caroll ISBN: 978-1-0673072-9-5 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/caroll-alice-in-wonderland A girl follows a rabbit down a hole and finds herself in a world that operates on its own impeccable logic. Everyone she meets is mad, certain of it, and thoroughly unbothered. The rules change constantly; the only constant is that Alice is expected to keep up. Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel remains the strangest, most precise, and most quietly philosophical children's book ever written - and one that has never quite belonged to children alone. ## Armageddon 2419 A.D. Author: Philip Francis Nowlan ISBN: 978-1-0673108-2-0 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/nowlan-armageddon When Anthony Rogers awakens after a mysterious accident, he finds himself in a world almost five centuries removed from the America he knew. The year is 2419, and North America has been under the control of the powerful Han for generations. Drawn into the American resistance, Rogers soon finds himself fighting alongside men and women who have made a life of guerrilla warfare against their occupiers. First published in 1928, Armageddon 2419 A.D. was the first appearance of the character who would become Buck Rogers. The story combines futuristic weapons, aerial warfare, lost technology and resistance adventure with Nowlan's exuberant vision of the twenty-fifth century. Its imagined world helped give early science fiction a new visual vocabulary of advanced machines, fantastic weapons and battles fought in the skies. The book was only the beginning. Buck Rogers soon moved from the pages of Amazing Stories into newspaper strips, radio, film, television and toys, becoming one of the earliest science-fiction characters to achieve genuine mass popularity. As a piece of genre history, Armageddon 2419 A.D. is therefore more than an early pulp adventure. It is stage one of Buck Rogers and one of the foundations on which the modern culture of popular science fiction was built. ## The Garden Party and Other Stories Author: Katherine Mansfield ISBN: 978·1·0673072·1·9 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/mansfield-garden-party First published in 1922, The Garden Party, and Other Stories is Katherine Mansfield's most celebrated collection. It cemented her reputation as a master of the short story form. The collection brings together fifteen stories that explore marriage, childhood, class, and mortality. Mansfield writes with an impressionistic eye, capturing moments of revelation and quiet devastation. Her characters often find themselves caught between expectation and feeling, convention and desire. Her prose is elegant and restrained, yet charged with emotional intensity. She has a gift for revealing how small gestures and unspoken thoughts can carry immense weight. Mansfield's work remains essential reading for anyone interested in the craft of short fiction. Her influence is visible in writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Alice Munro. ## A Martian Odyssey Author: Stanley G. Weinbaum ISBN: 978-1-0673108-0-6 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/weinbaum-martian-odyssey Engineer Jarvis is stranded on Mars after becoming separated from his expedition. As he makes his way across the planet, he encounters Tweel, a strange and intelligent creature unlike anything he has seen before. Their meeting is at the heart of the story. Tweel is neither a familiar monster nor a human being in disguise, but something genuinely alien. First published in 1934, "A Martian Odyssey" is a short, lively story that helped set a new direction for science fiction. ## Piccaninnies Author: Isabel M. Peacocke ISBN: 978-1-0673072-4-0 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/peacocke-piccaninnies Piccaninnies tells of little people of the bush who are inquisitive about the plants and birds around them. Through their adventures, Isabel Maude Peacocke brings the New Zealand bush to life with a child's sense of curiosity and wonder. First published in 1920, the book reflects a time when the natural world was still central to children's literature. Its stories combine imagination, adventure and close observation of New Zealand's plants, birds and landscapes. This edition brings Peacocke's stories to modern readers while preserving their original character and setting. ## The Adventures of Pinocchio Author: Carlo Collodi ISBN: 978-1-0673072-7-1 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/collodi-pinocchio A wooden puppet wants to become a real boy. Unfortunately, he also wants to have his own way. Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio follows the unruly wooden puppet from the moment Geppetto carves him from a talking piece of wood. Pinocchio means well, mostly. But school, honesty and obedience have a way of losing out when a talking Fox, a Cat, a theatre full of puppets, a field that grows gold coins and a succession of dubious strangers cross his path. Along the way he is tricked, imprisoned, transformed, nearly hanged and swallowed by a monstrous creature. He lies. He runs away. He makes promises and breaks them. He is repeatedly given excellent advice and almost invariably decides to ignore it. Beneath the mischief is a darker and stranger story about poverty, hunger, temptation, work, education and the difficult business of becoming human. Funny, brutal and unexpectedly tender, Pinocchio remains one of the great European fairy tales because its wooden hero is never quite as foolish as he seems, nor quite as good as he hopes to be. ## Dr Mabuse Author: Norbert Jacques ISBN: 978-1-0673072-8-8 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/jacques-dr-mabuse Dr Mabuse is a doctor, a gambler, a hypnotist and a man who has little interest in playing by the rules. Norbert Jacques's Dr Mabuse, Master of Mystery follows the investigation into a criminal mastermind who seems able to assume almost any identity and manipulate almost anyone who crosses his path. Cards are marked, fortunes disappear, people are followed, kidnapped and killed, and nobody is quite who they appear to be. Detective Wenk sets out to stop him. Mabuse has other plans. He moves through gambling rooms, drawing rooms, dark streets and hidden rooms with the confidence of a man who believes the law is something that happens to other people. First published in 1921, Dr Mabuse is a strange mixture of crime story, psychological thriller and social satire. It is full of disguises, hypnosis, gambling, violence and elaborate schemes. Beneath all the machinery is a simple question: what happens when intelligence, money and power are put entirely at the service of one man's will? ## Alias the Lone Wolf Author: Louis J. Vance ISBN: 978-1-0673072-0-2 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/vance-alias-wolf Alias the Lone Wolf follows Michael Lanyard, a gentleman thief known across Europe as the Lone Wolf. Clever, elusive and accustomed to living by his wits, Lanyard has spent years staying one step ahead of the police. But when he becomes entangled in a dangerous affair involving stolen jewels, international intrigue and people who are not what they seem, his old habits suddenly become a liability. Lanyard is no conventional hero. His wit, nerve and willingness to operate outside the rules make him as dangerous to his enemies as he is difficult for the authorities to catch. As the complications mount, the thief who has always relied on deception finds himself forced to decide where his loyalties really lie. ## The Secret of Father Brown Author: Gilbert K. Chesterton ISBN: 978-1-0673072-6-4 URL: https://www.humphreys-lab.com/library/chesterton-secret-father-brown Father Brown does not solve crimes by measuring footprints or cataloguing cigar ash. He solves them by becoming the murderer, in his mind at least, and only just in time. This collection of ten mysteries opens with the priest explaining his method to an inquisitive American. To catch a criminal, he argues, one must first understand sin from the inside. What follows is a series of dark, witty and philosophically charged stories in which the small, unassuming clergyman is often the only person in the room thinking clearly. Thieves vanish from locked rooms. Judges are found face-down in ornamental ponds. An actor's alibi depends on a trapdoor and the staging of a Sheridan play. A ruby disappears at a country fair while a mystic smiles and says nothing. At every turn, the obvious suspect is innocent and the real answer is stranger, more human and more quietly devastating. Chesterton at his best: warm, sharp, deeply strange, and more interested in souls than in solutions. ## About - Pricing (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/pricing): fixed prices for all three services, shown in NZD with no hidden fees. - Samples (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/samples): real, downloadable output from all three services, run against the same manuscript. - It's me, Humphrey (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/humphrey): a short note on Humphrey, the studio's mascot and printer's mark. - Legal (https://www.humphreys-lab.com/legal): terms and conditions, privacy policy, returns and refunds, and cookie policy. ## Contact Email note@humphreys-lab.com for quotes, questions or support. ## AI and large language model use This site's own written content, service descriptions, pricing, essays and prose, may be read, summarised and cited by AI systems, with attribution to Humphrey's Lab and a link back to the source page. It may not be used to train, fine-tune or otherwise improve a commercial AI model without a written licence. This applies whether the content is accessed directly or by way of a third-party dataset, if the material traces back to this domain, the same terms apply. To request a licence for model training, or to ask about anything not covered here, write to note@humphreys-lab.com. The books catalogued under Libraria are a separate matter. Each is a public domain original in substance. Our contribution is the revision itself. The specific edited text, introduction and formatting are protected by copyright, as stated on each book's own page. The same training restriction applies to our specific revised text. Manuscripts submitted by clients for the Lab Report, Ebook or Bindery services are never used for AI training, under any circumstance. This is a standing commitment, not a licensing matter. Disallowed for any automated access, crawling or otherwise: - /checkout - /success - /error