The Wiles of Sexton Maginnis

A novel that describes Roman Catholic parish life in a small, working-class, post-Civil War Maryland town, in a delightful, humorous way—and especially deals with the issue of merging ethnicities within a parish, an issue so familiar to Americans.  And this is not just about the Italians who are suddenly attending (and threatening to dominate) formerly-100%-Irish St. Kevin’s, where Kerry-born Lewis Maginnis is sexton.  Believe it or not, as the reader will soon learn, even within the Irish community itself there is rivalry between groups depending upon where in Ireland they traced their ancestry, and likewise to the Italians it is crucial to know whether one is Sicilian or Genoese!  Ah, what could be more American than that?

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.