The Dancer in Yellow

W. E Norris novels are fun to read.  He possessed a timeless sense of humor that makes almost every paragraph a delight to read.  This is how it was stated it in the foreword to My Friend Jim: “Norris wields a well-honed dry wit like a rapier, in such an effective style that the subtlety and delightfulness of his barbs are not lost even a century and a half later.”  The Dancer in Yellow follows a familiar theme for Norris, having its primary character start out chasing after an inappropriate relationship with an inappropriate woman, while a far better choice later comes into focus and is obviously available to him—obviously to the reader at least.  As usual with Norris novels, whatever twists and turns might happen in this obtuse-but-thoroughly-decent man’s life, the immersion in Victorian-era English society, provided as a matter of course in every Norris novel, is every Anglophilic, historical-fiction-loving reader’s dream.

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.