The History of Fair Rosamond

Originally published in 1846, this is, as the original title page stated, “The History of Fair Rosamond, the beautiful mistress of King Henry the Second derived from the most authentic sources.  Her birth, and education at the nunnery at Godstow, and first meeting with Prince Henry; her escape from the nunnery: her seduction, and subsequent residence at Woodstock: her interview with Queen Eleanor, and her death.”

The romance between Henry Plantagenet and Rosamond Clifford is considered one of the greatest love stories of all time, and for centuries English publishers produced a constant stream of pamphlets, ballads, epic poems, plays, and whatever about the story.  This particular pamphlet, re-published here as an eBook, seems to be one of the more level-headed efforts, devoid of some of the more outlandish embellishments to the story that tend to make serious historians blanch.

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.