ShelfLayer Connect
Vol. I  ·  MMXXVI  ·  The Reading Room
No. 001 — Established 2026 — Public-domain books for agents

A library card
for your agents.

ShelfLayer gives your model the right book, the right passage, and a citation it can carry back into the conversation.

Read the Docs The Philosophy →
Portraits of the readers

Three agents.
One library card each.

We commissioned a series of portraits of our regular patrons. The faces are theirs. The chairs, the bookplates, and the right-cuffed sleeves are ours.

Portrait № I Oil on linen · 2026
Seated Victorian scholar, agent-mark for a head, pen in hand, open book in lap. The Scholar · in the reading chair

The Scholar

Research & long-form synthesis

Agents that draft literature reviews, essays, and survey notes can search public-domain books first, then quote with a source trail attached.

Reads passages Cites by locator
Portrait № II Oil on linen · 2026
Standing Victorian gentleman with a leather book and walking cane, agent-mark head. The Practitioner · between consultations

The Practitioner

MCP hosts and builder tools

Coding agents, chat clients, and internal copilots that need a library tool instead of another unstructured web scrape.

Reads passage-depth Calls six tools
Portrait № III Oil on linen · 2026
Standing Victorian investigator with magnifying glass and scroll, agent-mark head, by gothic window. The Investigator · checking a source

The Investigator

Private enterprise shelves

Teams that want a custom MCP pointed at internal docs, a company wiki, country law, technical manuals, or another private corpus.

Reads private corpora Ships custom shelves
Your agent is reading
the internet.
It should be reading the canon.

For two thousand years, humanity has been hiding its best thinking inside books. Then, in a span of twenty years, we taught machines to ignore them — to graze instead on a paddock of search-optimised paragraphs, ad-laced summaries, and confidently-wrong forum posts.

We disagree with that arrangement. The deepest answer to most questions worth asking has already been written, edited, peer-reviewed, and shelved. What's missing is the librarian — one who can listen to an agent's task, walk the stacks, and return with the right chapter open.

ShelfLayer is that librarian, exposed as an MCP server.

— The Curators · Folio 001
What your agent reads now

The Optimised Web

A thin gruel of listicles, content farms, AI-generated spam, paywalled previews, and reddit threads from 2014 — all weighted by who paid most for the click.

  • ↳ Optimised for ranking, not for truth
  • ↳ Recency mistaken for relevance
  • ↳ Same five sources, infinitely rephrased
  • ↳ No author, no edition, no editor
vs
What we let it read instead

The Shelf

Public-domain books with shelves, tables of contents, sections, notes, and passages. The beta starts with Project Gutenberg and expands from there.

  • ↳ Authored, edited, dated, attributed
  • ↳ Indexed by shelf, book, section, and passage
  • ↳ Passages, not "approximately said"
  • ↳ Every answer can carry a spine
How a query becomes a passage

One call. Three movements.

From your agent's vague intention to a citable paragraph, in less time than it takes to walk to a shelf.

i.

Frame the field

Tell us the subject as a working librarian would understand it — "stoic ethics," "political economy," "early psychology." We resolve it to shelves and book metadata.

ii.

Walk the stacks

We search the indexed passages with book-aware filters, then traverse the strongest matches by shelf, book, and section — never just titles, never just tables of contents.

iii.

Open the page

Your agent receives the passage, the surrounding section when needed, and a structural citation. The kind of source trail that survives inspection.

See the full flow →
Currently on the shelf

A canon in progress.

Browse the full catalog →
PHI · STOIC Meditations AURELIUS
ECO · 330 The Wealth of Nations SMITH
WAR · STRAT The Art of War SUN TZU
POL · 320 Democracy in America TOCQUEVILLE
PHI · 184 The Republic PLATO
LIB · 323 On Liberty MILL
A working librarian, over MCP

Six tools.
One shelf.

Connect your MCP host to ShelfLayer and call search_passages, list_books, inspect_book, read_section, and get_citation.

↳ STREAMABLE HTTP MCP
↳ KEYWORD FULL-TEXT SEARCH
↳ STRUCTURAL CITATIONS
MCP  ·  tools/call search_passages 
# your agent needs source material on thrift and interest.
# it asks the shelf instead of scraping the web.

{
  "name": "search_passages",
  "arguments": {
    "query": "\"compound interest\" OR thrift economy",
    "shelf": "economics-and-finance",
    "limit": 5
  }
}

// → passages with book_id, section_id, passage_id,
//   plus a citation helper for user-facing answers.
The shelves are open

Let your agents
read for a living.

Free during public beta. Connect with Google from your MCP client.

Connect ShelfLayer Browse the Catalog