The Dreadnought Boys on Aero Service

Published originally in 1912, this novel written for young adults is the fourth of six describing the adventures of Ned Strong and Herc Taylor, two rural farm boys, cousins, who decide to leave the farm owned by their parsimonious grandfather who raised them and run off to join the U. S. Navy in the period shortly before the United States decided to enter World War I (1914–1918), known as the “Great War.”  The storyline of this fourth in the series follows the cousins on their assignment to a brand new “aeroplane” service the Navy has started.  In the previous book, when Ned and Herc were helping test a new submarine, it was private, corporate interests that tried to sabotage the Navy’s efforts, but this time it’s anarchists plotting against the Navy of the United States of America—with a plan to send torpedoes at the anchored fleet.  If the bad guys in this plotline sound familiar to readers of the current century, maybe it’s because they’ve seen Antifa’s violence documented in daily news accounts.

At the least it’s a good reminder that the anarchist movement has been a scourge on civilization for a long time.

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.