The Dreadnought Boys on Battle Practice

Published originally in 1911, this novel written for young adults is the first of six describing the adventures of Ned Strong and Herc Taylor, two rural farm boys, cousins, who decide to leave the farm owned by their parsimonious grandfather who raised them and run off to join the U. S. Navy in the period shortly before the United States decided to enter World War I (1914–1918), known as the “Great War.”  The storyline of this first novel is about their decision to join the navy, their training, their experiences upon joining their first ship, some excitement involving foreign spies who are after U. S. technology, and finally some desperate heroics in a gun turret that earn them Medals of Honor.

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.