Asmodeus at Large

Even if you’ve never heard of Bulwer-Lytton, you’ve no doubt heard or read his infamous opening phrase from the novel Paul Clifford—“It was a dark and stormy night...”—which Charlie Brown’s Snoopy liked so much when he was trying to be an author on top of his doghouse.  You may also be familiar with other Bulwer-Lytton phrases: “the great unwashed;” “pursuit of the almighty dollar;” “the pen is mightier than the sword;” etc.  He was an immensely popular writer who made gobs of money selling novels—and for good measure talked Charles Dickens into changing the ending of Great Expectations so that Pip and Estella get together.

This 1833 novel, more an excuse for social commentary than a work of fiction, reprises the demon Asmodeus from the 1707 novel by French writer Alain-René Lesage, The Devil upon Two Sticks.  The demon as a literary device is used in exactly the same way, as a vehicle for offering social commentary about society.  In Lesage’s novel that society was Madrid’s—in this case it is the society of London and Paris.

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.