My Courtship and Its Consequences

Henry Wikoff, an American gentleman who may have the dubious honor of being the original inspiration for the phrase “confidence man” (later shortened in popular usage to “con man”), in 1852 endured a world-famous trial for abducting his own fiancée in Genoa, then part of the constitutional Kingdom of Sardinia.  The charges were considered utterly spurious or at least excessive by many, justly warranted by others, but regardless of the merits of the charges the trial was a sensation, having everything necessary to engage the public’s fascination: a wealthy heiress abducted in the night, a gentleman accused of being a fortune-seeker and spy, guns, chloroform, an exotic foreign locale, and of course romance.  And if the various reports of the trial in newspapers were not enough to make it a sensation, when Henry Wikoff, after serving fifteen months in a flea-infested Italian prison, returned to society with a vengeance to restore his reputation by publishing this autobiographical version of the events that had transpired, well, of course, the book was an instant bestseller in both America and Britain.

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.