The Colonel’s Daughter; or, Winning His Spurs

No writer is better than Charles King at bringing the reader vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the late-19th-early-20th century.  Because of his personal experience as an officer in the conflicts of that period, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, financial, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

Published originally in 1882, The Colonel’s Daughter; or, Winning His Spurs was Mr. King’s first real commercial success, apparently sufficiently stimulating him with enthusiasm for the possible monetary rewards to be gleaned from writing that he decided to continue the use of many of the same characters introduced herein as stars in subsequent novels—especially of course in this novel’s explicit sequel, Marion’s Faith.  The end result is a series of novels in which the reader is continually re-introduced to favorite characters in different circumstances, as though meeting old friends in new places.

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.