gutenberg-mcp

An MCP server that gives an LLM direct search and read access to Project Gutenberg's catalog of 75,000+ free public-domain books.

Tools

get_book_text is paginated by word count (default 3,000 words, ~10-12 pages) rather than returning entire books at once, so an LLM can pull exactly the section it needs without blowing its context window.

Related MCP server: mcp-books

Why this exists (and not the gutendex API)

Most Gutenberg MCP servers wrap the third-party gutendex.com API. As of mid-2026 that service sits behind a Cloudflare JS challenge that a plain HTTP client can't solve — every request gets a 403, regardless of headers or user-agent. Several existing "Gutenberg MCP" repos on GitHub are broken for this same reason.

This server goes straight to Project Gutenberg instead:

• Search is built from Gutenberg's own sanctioned bulk catalog feed (gutenberg.org/cache/epub/feeds/pg_catalog.csv) — the same data Gutendex itself is built from. Gutenberg's robots.txt explicitly disallows crawling /ebooks/search, so this server doesn't scrape that page; the bulk feed is the sanctioned way to get catalog data for search.

• Book text is fetched directly from Gutenberg's own plaintext mirrors (gutenberg.org/cache/epub/{id}/pg{id}.txt), which robots.txt does allow.

The catalog CSV (~21MB) is fetched once per server process and cached in memory — not re-downloaded per call.

Running it

docker build -t gutenberg-mcp-server .

Add to your MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop / Claude Code):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gutenberg": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "gutenberg-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

License

MIT