From the Ranks

No writer is better than Charles King—at the point when this novel was published a captain, but eventually a general—at bringing the reader more vividly and realistically into the life of a U. S. Army soldier during the wars with the plains Indians of the American West.  Because of his personal experience of those wars, he not only gets the historical details correct, but also the settings, moods, and day-to-day life, including the personal, romantic, and family life of the soldiers living on those far-flung military posts along the western frontier.

And the personal lives of the wives and lovers of those soldiers, too.  For therein lies the secret of Mr. King’s novels: the romances and emotional entanglements of life on a Western military base in the 19th century are the main focus of his stories, even in the midst of the various Indian wars and outbreaks which inevitably intruded upon those affairs, and which to the historian no doubt seem more important.  From the Ranks brings together three different men—a long-lost son, a man afflicted by a case of love at first sight, and an officer who ruins his life and reputation with ungentlemanly conduct—into one sweeping story about the choices we make in life and the repercussions that ensue.

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.