The Sea-King

Published in 1878 as one in a series of dime novels called the “The Seaside Library” by New York publisher George Munro, this edition of The Sea-King is assumed to be a reprint of a novel written circa 1830, and some bibliophiles maintain that the credited author of this dime-novel version, Frederick Marryat (1792–1848), was originally merely the editor of a novel actually written by Robert Burts (17??–1839).  Marryat’s greater fame may have given later publishers incentive to give him sole credit.  But whatever his contribution, the pace and mood of The Sea-King is very much a Marryat pace and mood—dark, emotionally entangled, family connections often overshadowing the naval action—as it tells the story of a young man’s estrangement from his father, running away to sea, romance with and estrangement from a woman, and then rapprochement with both as he repeatedly fends off the vindictive jealousy of a bitter, but accidental, rival.

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.