The Losing Side, A Poem; and, Why He Didn’t Insure, A Dialogue

A short little hard-covered pamphlet of the temperance movement—comprising an 824-word poem titled “The Losing Side” followed by a 1,441-word dialogue titled “Why He Didn’t Insure”—originally published in 1888, is here re-published as an eBook because of the importance of the author.  Mrs. Frank Lee—born Mary Chappell Skeel in Kingston, Ulster County, New York, in 1849—is probably the greatest writer the average reader never heard of, and this was the first thing she ever published.  Whether or not the pamphlet had any effect on getting Prohibition passed thirty two years later, seeing her words in print apparently inspired the author to bless posterity with at least nine other works, mostly novels.  In that respect at least the pamphlet was a huge success.

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.