The Ballet Dancer’s Husband

Originally published in the late 1860s in French, this English translation was published in 1881 as number 911 of “The Seaside Library” series from George Munro, a New York publisher who made a regular practice of re-publishing English translations of European literature with expired copyrights.  The novel tells the story of a woman’s enduring love for and commitment to a man utterly undeserving of her affection or loyalty, and happens to be the sequel to a prior book about the same two erstwhile lovers, Monsieur de Saint-Bertrand, Suite d’Un Début a l’Opéra, published in 1864—the first novel as far as we know was never translated into English.

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.