The Wrecker’s Prize

Published originally in 1864, The Wrecker’s Prize is No. 65 of the Beadle’s Dime Novels series. The story is about a community along the Long Island seashore who, like so many seashore communities during the Age of Sail, eagerly took advantage of shipwrecks to collect the often valuable debris that would wash ashore—but in this case the biggest treasure turns out to be an unidentified infant girl of obviously wealthy social standing. This unfortunate orphan is raised by her poor adoptive parents and considered the “Pearl” of the community.

About the author, Henry J. Thomas, next to nothing is known, other than they wrote a number of dime novels for Beadle and Company’s various series. There is one interesting and mysterious fact: that more often than not the identifier Mrs. appeared in front of the name, so either husband and wife were both writers, or the writer was female and Beadle sometimes omitted the Mrs. (because in the 19th century crediting a female writer could have a negative effect on sales).

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.