Quiet Days in Spain

Published originally in 1910, this was the author’s second travelogue about Spain, a country he obviously loved.  The first was A Vagabond in Spain, published in 1895.  In both books he waxes philosophical and spiritual; and seems as much interested in getting to know the people on a personal level as he does in describing historical and religious monuments.  For him, the description of Spain is a deeply personal business, a narrative about a love affair rather than a dry traveler’s guide.

The author, Charles Bogue Luffman (1862–1920), was born in Devon, England, the son of a gamekeeper.  After working in the dried fruit business in Italy, France, and Spain during his late twenties, he returned to England just long enough to publish A Vagabond in Spain.  Offered a government position in Victoria as a raisin consultant, he eventually ended up heading a school of horticulture, staying in Australia until 1908 when he retired and traveled back to Spain for the nine-month sojourn which formed the basis for this book.

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.