The Black Band; or, The Two King Bradys Against a Hard Gang

A nickel weekly originally published January 27, 1899, this was New York publisher Frank Tousey’s very first issue of the popular “Secret Service” series featuring “Old and Young King Brady, Detectives.”  After this successful start, the issues came out like clockwork every Friday for more than two and a half decades—by which time more than thirteen hundred of them had been published.  The Black Band; or, The Two King Bradys Against a Hard Gang introduces the Bradys and their detective partnership as they battle one of the worst gangs to ever prey on Gotham.  After numerous setbacks and countless disguises assumed, the dynamic duo wins the day, setting the tone for years of reading excitement to come.

At more than 27,000 words, this novella-sized work of pulp fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) 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.