The Wreck of the Albion: A Tale of the Sea

Published originally in 1862, The Wreck of the Albion; A Tale of the Sea is No. 46 of the Beadle’s Dime Novels series.  The story is about family, honor, and romantic love more than about sailing, but in the process of telling that story the author places the reader on a sailing ship in the midst of a particularly vicious Caribbean hurricane, and wrecks that ship, leaving the main protagonists struggling to survive afterward.  As so often happens in a good Age of Sail story, the ocean provides the crucible that highlights the triumphs and failures of men.

About the author, John S. Warner, next to nothing is known, other than he wrote a number of dime novels for Beadle and Company’s various dime novel series.  The most we have been able to learn about Mr. Warner comes from two sentences on the website of the Northern Illinois University Libraries: “John S. Warner was probably the true name of the author since he was writing in the early days of the Dime Novel before pseudonyms became common.  In a Beadle blurb he was called ‘a sailor of experience.’”

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.