The Dancing Star; or, The Smuggler of the Chesapeake

A wealthy young man who seems to have been a bad seed since birth, eventually losing his father’s respect and his inheritance, while he is a wanted man falls in with a more experienced criminal and agrees to become employed as a smuggler and pirate. He is opposed by two good men, both sailors, plus a driven lawman less black and white in character, who is chasing him and who has his own story. And of course there is much sailing involved... as should be the case with all novels.

Published originally in 1857, The Dancing Star; or, The Smuggler of the Chesapeake: A Story of the Coast and Sea was the sixth entry in The Weekly Novelette series published by M. M. Ballou in Boston, Massachusetts; each member of the series being published in four issues over the course of four weeks. Each issue was priced at ten cents, technically making these “dime novels” supposedly, even though it would cost the reader forty cents to read the entirety. And in addition to that contradiction, at more than 66,000 words The Dancing Star is definitely a full-sized novel in length, not a novelette.

The author, Joseph Holt Ingraham (1809–1860), is most famous for his epistolary Hebraic Power Trilogy novels, but before he became a pastor and completed those works he was a prolific writer of pulp fiction, or “yellow-covered filth” as the more religious folk labeled it at the time. As a pulp fiction author he would certainly rate as one of the more polished writers, and he must have had some experience at sea because the sailing action in his novels is among the best ever created.

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.