The Life of David Haggart

At one time, the name of David Haggart (1801–1821) was infamous throughout the English-speaking world.  A Scottish rogue, he was a regular pickpocket, burglar, and shoplifter haunting towns, fairs, and racecourses all over Scotland; and sometimes, when things got too hot for him in Scotland, in Ireland.  After he accidentally killed a turnkey in the Dumfries jail during an 1820 escape, and was eventually captured and condemned to death, between the trial and his execution he partly wrote, partly dictated this memoir of his criminal history, which includes George Combe’s phrenological notes and Haggart’s own comments as appendices.  The book also includes a glossary of criminal slang so readers can understand the “Scottish thieves’ cant” they are reading, and illustrations from various sources, including Combe’s sketch of Haggart’s skull.

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.