The Blue Jeans of Hoppertown

Seventy one years before Garrison Keillor invented Lake Wobegon for A Prairie Home Companion, Roy K. Moulton invented Hoppertown for The Grand Rapids Press.  The end result for the two inventors was similar: worldwide fame as humorists, enduring public affection for the two fictional towns, and careers spent repeatedly answering the same irritating question—“Where exactly is the place?”

There is no doubt that Roy K. Moulton is the most famous humorist West Michigan ever produced.  The column he entitled “The Hoppertown Gazette” and originally wrote for The Grand Rapids Press eventually ran in eighty newspapers across the United States and Canada; plus, his writing appeared in magazines like Collier’s Weekly, Success, Judge, The Cosmopolitan, etc.  Describing his own career, Mouton wrote about himself: “I landed in Grand Rapids on the Evening Press, having crawled in under the tent while Harry B. Stitt, the managing editor, wasn’t looking.  There isn’t much more to say.  Burgess Johnson, editor of Judge, showed the true sportsman’s spirit by declaring that he would stand the chance of publishing some of my stuff, if I would relieve him of all responsibility by allowing my name to be signed to it, thereby proving alibis for his other contributors. I agreed.”

And about this book with its forty six illustrations, originally published in 1908, he said: “Those who are looking for a plot will not find it.  The only plot in connection with this book exists between the author and the publisher and its object is to sell as many copies as possible.  This work is calculated to portray the various phases of life in a little country village; the village we all know, with its society, its politics and its varied industries from frog spearing to cider making.  Hoppertown might be located anywhere, so you may choose your own state.  Every county in every state has a dozen towns like it.”

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.