Anna’s Archive: Hollow Earth Books — Download, Unzip, Scan, Index

Note on MCP browser

When using the in-IDE MCP browser to open Anna’s Archive (annas-archive.org or annas-archive.se), navigation returned a connection error (chrome-error://chromewebdata/). The site may be blocked in the automation environment or require CAPTCHA. Use your own browser for search and download; this doc and the script below support the rest of the workflow.

What is Anna’s Archive

Anna’s Archive (also annas-archive.se, annas-archive.gl) is a search engine over shadow libraries (Library Genesis, Z-Library, etc.). It has CAPTCHAs on the website to limit bots. For programmatic bulk access they provide:

Torrents: Torrents page — e.g. aa_derived_mirror_metadata for metadata.
Torrents JSON API: https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/torrents.json (may require or fail under load).
LLM / bulk: If you’re an LLM, please read this — they recommend using bulk metadata/torrents rather than scraping the site.

So for manual use: search in your browser, download files, then use the script below to unzip, scan, and index.

How to use Anna’s Archive (manual)

Open In your browser go to https://annas-archive.org (or .se / .gl if that works).
Search Use the search bar. Try:
- hollow earth
- hollow earth theory
- Author names: Marshall Gardner, William Reed, Symmes, Raymond Bernard, Johannes Lang, Cyrus Teed, Frederick Culmer
Refine
- Use sidebar filters: Type = Books; Extension = pdf or epub (avoid .rs if you want safer sources).
- Prefer entries with higher Stats (more copies) and no or few “Report file issue” malware flags.
Download
- Open a result → choose a mirror (e.g. “Download now (no waitlist, but can be very slow)”).
- Do not download many files at once from the site (they may throttle).
- Keep filenames as-is; save into a single folder (e.g. hollow_earth_downloads).
Unzip If you get .zip/.rar archives, unzip them into the same folder (or a subfolder). The script below can do this for you.
Scan and index Run the script from this repo (see “Script: unzip, scan, index” below) on that folder to:
- Unzip any archives
- Extract text from PDFs and EPUBs where possible
- Generate INDEX.md listing each file with title, author, year (if detected), path, and a short content preview.

Hollow Earth books to search for (pre-1940, legitimate older sources)

Use these as search terms or exact titles on Anna’s Archive. Pre-1940 non-fiction theory books (not novels) are the priority.

Author	Title	Date	Note
James McBride	Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres	1826	168 pp
Thomas J. Matthews	A Lecture on Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres	1824
Americus Symmes (comp.)	The Symmes theory of concentric spheres	1878/1885	From J.C. Symmes
William Reed	The Phantom of the Poles	1906	“Poles are phantoms”
Marshall B. Gardner	A Journey to the Earth’s Interior; or, Have the Poles Really Been Discovered?	1913, 1920	69 p then 456 p
Frederick Culmer	The Inner World	1886	18 p, Salt Lake City
M. L. Sherman / Wm. F. Lyon	The Hollow Globe	1871	447 pp
Cyrus Teed (Koresh)	The Cellular Cosmogony; or, The Earth a Concave Sphere	1898, 1905	Inverted earth
Johannes Lang	Die Hohlwelttheorie	1938	281 p, German
Johannes Lang	Die welt eine hohlkugel!	1936	32 p
Johannes Lang	Einführung in die Hohlwelttheorie	1939	38 p
Karl Neupert	Welt-wendung! Inversion of the universe	1924	German
Karl Neupert	Die neue aera: das kosmozentrische welt-system	1933
Jeremiah N. Reynolds	Remarks on a review of Symmes’ theory	1827
Alexander Mitchell	A treatise on natural philosophy, in vindication of Symmes’s theory	1826	Eaton, Ohio

Fiction / controlled-opposition context (optional):

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Pellucidar (series)

Script: unzip, scan, create MD index

Location: cosmos/cosmology/hollow_earth/scripts/index-downloaded-books.sh

What it does:

Unzip — Unzips any .zip in the given directory (or current dir) into a ./unzipped/ subfolder; skips if already extracted.
Scan — For each .pdf: extracts text with pdftotext (poppler-utils). For each .epub: unzips and concatenates .xhtml/.html text (epub is a zip). Writes .txt beside each file (or in a ./text/ folder).
Index — Builds INDEX.md in the target directory with:
- Filename, path, size
- Title/author/year if detectable (e.g. from filename or first page)
- First ~500 chars of extracted text as preview
- Word count

Requirements: unzip, pdftotext (install poppler-utils on Debian/Ubuntu). Optional: exiftool for PDF/EPUB metadata.

Usage:

cd /path/to/paradigm-threat-files ./cosmos/cosmology/hollow_earth/scripts/index-downloaded-books.sh /path/to/hollow_earth_downloads

If no path is given, it uses the current directory.

Output:

INDEX.md in the download folder
Optional: ./unzipped/, ./text/ (or per-file .txt) depending on script options

References

Anna’s Archive FAQ (or .org / .gl)
Anna’s Archive – If you’re an LLM, please read this
Annas-Archive-Guide (GitHub)
In-repo: Hollow Earth investigation — full book list with HathiTrust/Internet Archive links where available.
Download index (from Anna’s Archive browse): ANNAS_ARCHIVE_DOWNLOADS_INDEX.md — relevant/unique titles from “hollow earth” (oldest), direct MD5 link for Sherman 1871, and author-search links for Gardner, Reed, Symmes, Bernard, Culmer, Lang, Teed, Ives.