Stepping Heavenward

A classic of Christian fiction for a century and a half, this novel tells the story of a teenage girl’s lifelong effort to love and know God as she matures into womanhood, becomes a wife and mother, and experiences the tragedies and heartbreaks, the joys and triumphs, and the general vicissitudes of life; all of which she shares with readers in the form of journal entries.  Originally published in installments in the Chicago Advance in 1869, this novel has been republished repeatedly over the years and become a staple of Sunday-school classes around the world, both for young adults and adults.  The hardcover book from which this digital version was created was published in 1901 with eight illustrations by an unnamed artist.

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.