A Christmas Mystery

Published originally in 1896, A Christmas Mystery describes a utopian vision that comes to a Chicago commuter on his way home December 22, 1892.  The vision is of December 24, 1949—Christmas Eve—far in the future, and describes a world where the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the concurrent Parliament of Religions has inspired a different world, a world where an impossibly beautiful, impossibly large, impossibly perfect in all aspects new church, the Church of the Redeemer, has been built on the Lake Michigan shoreline, replacing every other church and all various denominations and religions, and spread its message of reconciliation and peace around the globe.

The author, Charles O. Boring, was the first Sunday School Superintendent of the Emmanuel Methodist Episcopal Church of Evanston, officially completed in 1892 just in time for the aforementioned world’s fair.  One can only assume it was a time of great optimism and limitless aspirations, at least for the people of Chicago.

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.