Captain Close

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.

In Captain Close, instead of King’s usual fare of describing the Indian wars of the Wild West, we are taken into the Deep South immediately after the Civil War, when animosities were still blatant, feelings still bitter, wounds still fresh, and the emotional re-constitution of the republic little more than a pipe-dream.  From the perspective of a new Army lieutenant fresh from cadethood at West Point and assigned to a small “occupation” force in southern Mississippi, we see what that minefield of resentments must have been like to traverse.  (Although, not to worry, there is still some brief Indian warfare thrown in to keep Charles King fans from experiencing withdrawal pangs.)

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.