The Young Mountaineer

A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, The Young Mountaineer is number 2 of the beloved Beadle’s Frontier Series which featured better writing and character development than most nickel weeklies.  This particular story takes place during the Great Arizona Diamond Swindle of 1872... which, apparently, the author remained unaware was a swindle at the time he was writing the book.  It makes for an interesting read for a 21st century reader who knows for a fact there never were any great diamond discoveries in Arizona.  Fortunately the plot doesn’t require any actual diamonds as the story is more about friendship, hiding from Apaches, and overcoming the natural adversities of exploring 19th-century Arizona, than diamond digging.  Good thing, eh?—because the only diamonds actually picked up in Arizona were planted there by Wall Street swindlers hoping to make money selling fraudulent diamond-mining stocks.

At more than 37,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.