Jemmy Daily; or, The Little News Vender

Originally published in 1843, a quarter century before Horatio Alger became the foremost producer of “rags-to-riches” fiction—and in some errant minds the originator of the genre—Jemmy Daily is the story of a desperately poor boy who eschews immoral temptations and instead becomes a newsboy hawking newspapers on the street—a rather new occupation in Boston at the time.  By diligent effort, clever innovation, and strong work ethic he pulls himself and his mother out of poverty... the quintessential American success story.

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.