Two American Boys with the Allied Armies

Published originally in 1915, this novel written for young adults is about two American boys searching for an estranged brother in war-torn Belgium during World War I—the “Great War”—the story in some respects presaging the World War II story “Saving Private Ryan.”  In this case, a Chicago father is grief-stricken at discovering he had years before falsely accused his older son of a crime, causing him to leave home and never come back.  The father learns this prodigal son is now fighting with the British somewhere in Europe, and the younger son with his cousin is sent across the Atlantic to find and bring home the older brother, for a long-overdue reconciliation with his father.

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.