Sut Lovingood’s Yarns

Before there was Mark Twain writing American classics filled with authentic regional slang and dialect—before there was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—there was George Washington Harris (March 20, 1814–December 11, 1869) with his Sut Lovingood stories.  During the 1850s and 1860s, when Mark Twain was still a growing boy named Samuel Clemens, still working as a printer’s apprentice, and, later, still riverboating on the Mississippi, Mr. Harris’s humor columns featuring Sut Lovingood speaking Tennessee slang were already being published in newspapers, primarily Nashville’s Union and American.  It was twenty four of these hugely popular stories that he collected and published, in 1867, as Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun By a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool, the title shortened on the cover of the book and in the frontispiece to Sut Lovingood’s Yarns.

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.