Naval Yarns

Fifty real-life stories of the British Navy during the Age of Sail, originally published as a collection in 1899.  The stories span the period from 1616 (“Dolphin” versus five Turkish men-of-war) to 1831 (capture of Spanish slaver by His Majesty’s brig “Black Joke”).  Most of the stories are first-person narratives, often in the form of letters written in the immediate aftermath of the battle or event described, when the smell of gunpowder, suffering of wounded, and frantic repair work still informs the scene.  Illustrated with ten drawings by various artists.

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.