Old Jack’s Frontier Cabin

A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, Old Jack’s Frontier Cabin is number 13 of the beloved Beadle’s Frontier Series which featured decent writing by some reliable history buffs along with better character development than most nickel weeklies.  This particular issue tells the story of a dastardly scoundrel who bribes a frontiersman to sell him his niece—human trafficking on the American frontier, who knew?—forces the poor girl into a fake wedding, kidnaps her against her will when she resists, tries to murder anybody who gets in his way, and otherwise shows himself to be an utter villain.  Fortunately, good men of the frontier, both Indian and white, gather together to prevent his nefarious plans from succeeding.

At more than 29,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) 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.