The Red Sultan

Scottish-born J. Maclaren Cobban, (April 24, 1849–October 31, 1903) was described by his publisher as “the Sir Walter Scott of to-day,” which may have been hyperbole in the name of salesmanship but The Red Sultan, published in 1894 by Rand, McNally & Company, New York, is actually good enough to make the comparison defensible.  A fascinating adventure story about a young Scotsman, freshly graduated from university as a doctor, who runs into an old acquaintance of his grandfather and learns that his grandfather, long presumed dead, may still be alive in Africa, The Red Sultan will hold the reader’s interest from beginning to end as the young doctor, because the grandfather holds the key to his own investiture as the rightful heir to the family estates, naturally decides to head for Africa to look for him, both for his own sake and his mother’s.

While the story is intriguing enough to hold the reader’s interest, the descriptions of 18th-century Africa (when the story takes place), both cultural and geographical, are worth the read all by themselves.  Clearly the author had firsthand experience with the Dark Continent and the modern day reader will be struck by how little has changed in more than two centuries.  As the hero observes at one point, the beauty and wealth of North Africa seem forever unrealized, blighted and ruined by dysfunctional leadership and corrupt government operating under the weight of close-minded Islamic tyranny.  Consequently, even as he is enchanted by the beauty and potential, our young hero longs for Scotland and home.

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.