The Defense of Redleysburg

The third work of fiction by Mrs. Frank Lee which Travelyn Publishing has re-published as an eBook, The Defense of Redleysburg, originally published in 1905, is about a young man whose family takes refuge from marauding Indians in a Kentucky fort during Pontiac’s War.  Publicly humiliated by the fort’s commandant upon arrival, the young man swallows his pride and redeems himself by sneaking out at night to hunt in secret, thereby managing to singlehandedly feed the fort’s refugees.  Later, he helps drive off the Indians for good.

Although The Defense of Redleysburg is short—at less than eight thousand words merely a novelette, technically—it is well worth buying and reading; an enjoyable, satisfying little book as all the author’s books seem to be.  Her fiction is highly reminiscent of Horatio Alger’s novels in tone, plot, and structure but the comparison with her more famous contemporary does not place Mrs. Lee in an unfavorable light.  If anything, Mr. Alger is the one who suffers by the comparison.

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.