Cruel Fred; And Other Funny Stories and Pictures

Four different children—three boys and one girl—with severe character defects are taught the error of their ways over the course of three or four pages of verse for each of them.  Every page includes a humorous illustration to accompany the verse.  While two of them learn their lesson, reform their ways, and live happily ever after, the other two are punished rather dramatically by modern standards—one of them eaten by wolves and the other by “birds of prey.”

Originally published in 1855 by an Edinburgh printer, this is a fun little book to read to children... and it can’t help but improve the little urchins’ behavior if they think misbehavior might be punished by getting eaten by wolves, eh?

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.