A Boy and a Box

After publishing The Making of Major as an eBook in January of 2017, we immediately set out to find other work by the same author because, although relatively unknown, Mrs. Frank Lee is such a talented writer.  A Boy and a Box (originally published in 1909), like all her novels has a persevering young hero who succeeds by strength of character, reminiscent of Horatio Alger or George Alfred Henty, both of whom were contemporaries of Mrs. Lee.  Plus it gives the reader the satisfaction of seeing an orphan reunited with his family —who can resist that?

In our opinion, although Alger was more prolific and obtained more fame, Mrs. Lee was the better writer.

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.