Roanoke; or, “Where is Utopia?”

Originally published in 1849, this delightful novel immerses the reader in the days leading up to the American Revolution as they were experienced in North Carolina, introducing a varied and fascinating cast of characters drawn from the traditions, legends, and documented history of the state.  The author, Calvin Henderson Wiley, was later superintendent of North Carolina schools (1853–1865) and can barely restrain his pedagogic instincts as he makes the case that North Carolina was where the Revolution actually started.

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.