The Boy Pirate; or, Life on the Ocean: Volume 2 of 6

A long-running English serial from the 19th century, possibly penny dreadfuls, gathered together and published in book form (a very large book!) in 1865, here re-published digitally in six volumes, of which this is Volume II.  The main storyline is about a boy of noble birth deprived of his birthright and forced into a life of piracy by his father’s steward, who murders the boy’s father, pretends to marry his mother, and takes over the lord’s estates.  The boy goes on to thrive as the renowned and feared “Red Raven,” travelling the world as a pirate while never forgetting the sense of honor and chivalry inculcated in him as an infant by his noble birthright.  (Okay, yeah, there’s a bit of classism inherent to that premise.  It was a British serial, not an American serial.)  There are numerous sub-plots and side stories, many different characters from various social classes, and the Boy Pirate manages to take his angst, ambition, guilty conscience, and heroic chivalry around the world, experiencing many and various adventures while giving readers a taste of diverse 19-century cultures in the process.

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.