Cedar Swamp; or, Wild Nat’s Brigade

Published originally in 1860, Cedar Swamp; or, Wild Nat’s Brigade is No. 13 of the Beadle’s Dime Novels series.  The story takes place during the American Revolution, specifically in the area of Charleston, South Carolina, an area of revolutionary conflict historians have, arguably, not concentrated their attention upon as much as they have on other areas.  In this story there are principled stands by patriotic Americans, exciting battles, romance, intrigues, and revelations about the divisions between American Tories (loyal to the English monarch) and Patriots.

The author, William R. Eyster, born in New York 1841, was a lawyer, Kansas homesteader, journalist, and writer of pulp fiction for various periodicals starting in 1858 when he was still a teenaged schoolboy.  He was probably still a teenager when he wrote this fiction.

Preparing old books 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.