The Farmer’s Boy

Clifton Johnson (1865–1940) was a portrait painter who combined words, photographs, and drawings to paint a picture of whatever happened to be the object of his attention; and in this book, the object of his attention was a typical 19th-century New England farm boy.  With 63 illustrations and over 27,000 words, Mr. Johnson follows this typical boy for one year—divided into four seasons—and describes with inerrant accuracy and uncanny insight what the boy looks like, how he acts, what he thinks, and then, finally, what he is liable to become.

Relax, step into the time machine, and enjoy the ride.  Recognize yourself in the farmer’s boy, appreciate your common humanity, feel the connection to your own past, and, above all, for just a minute, let yourself miss the child you used to be.

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.