Abrahamic

• Christian Scripture — 13 books. Complete Bibles, the deuterocanon, and the apocryphal gospels and acts that circulated alongside the canon.
• Christian Classics — 22 books. The devotional and theological works that shaped Western Christianity, from Augustine to the Reformation.
• Jewish Scripture and Classics — 14 books. The rabbinic tradition in English translation, the historians, and the legend cycles.
• Islamic Scripture and Classics — 13 books. Public-domain English translations of the Qur'an, the hadith, and the Sufi and philosophical tradition.
• Bahá'í and Bábí Texts — 5 books. A young religion whose earliest English translations are nonetheless out of copyright.
• Latter-day Saint Scripture — 5 books. The Book of Mormon, free since 1830, and the 19th-century literature around it.

Indian and East Asian

• Hindu Scripture — 20 books. The Gita, the Upanishads, the Rigveda, and the complete prose Mahabharata.
• Buddhist Scripture — 22 books. The Pali canon, the Mahayana sutras, and the Bardo Thodol.
• Chinese Classics — 12 books. The Confucian and Daoist canon in Legge's translations, including the I Ching.
• Sikh and Jain Scripture — 5 books. Macauliffe's Sikh Religion and Jacobi's Jaina Sutras.
• Japanese and Shinto Texts — 5 books. The Kojiki and the Nihongi, the two 8th-century chronicles.

Ancient and pre-Christian

• Zoroastrian Scripture — 7 books. The Avesta and the Pahlavi texts, including the Gathas.
• Ancient Near Eastern Religion — 10 books. Egyptian and Mesopotamian religious literature, including Gilgamesh.
• Norse and Celtic Religion — 8 books. Both Eddas, the Volsunga Saga, and the Mabinogion.
• Greek and Roman Religion — 7 books. Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and the mystery cults.
• Mesoamerican Religion — 4 books. The Popol Vuh, and the ethnography of the surviving Maya codices.

Across traditions

• Esoteric and Gnostic Texts — 4 books. Gnostic scripture and the Victorian occult revival.
• Comparative Religion — 8 books. Frazer, William James, and the founding of the field.
• The Sacred Books of the East — 5 books. Max Müller's fifty-volume Oxford series, the backbone of half this shelf.

Some traditions are thin here, and the reason is always the same: no free English translation exists.

• Sikhism. There is no complete public-domain English Guru Granth Sahib. Macauliffe's 1909 volumes carry a great deal of the scripture in translation and are the practical substitute.
• Buddhism. Gutenberg holds very little. Most of this shelf is Sacred Books of the East volumes from Wikisource and the Internet Archive.
• Indigenous and oral traditions. Barely represented. What was written down was mostly written by missionaries and ethnographers, and what is in the public domain reflects their interests rather than the traditions'. The Mesoamerican shelf is four books, three of them Victorian ethnography. African, Australian and most Native American traditions have nothing here at all, and putting something there properly needs more care than a download table can carry.
• Anything modern. No 20th-century translation, commentary, or new scripture, unless its copyright lapsed.

• The Reading Room — the library, and how to load these onto a device.
• Public Domain Books — why these are free and what you may do with them.
• Religion — the religion section this shelf serves.
• Culture — ethnicity, languages, diaspora, and the world zodiacs.