My Friend Jim

Pay no attention to the title of this book, it is not so much about the narrator’s friend, Jim, as it is about an awful woman who rampages through the lives of first the friend, Jim, then his other friend, along with a series of other men, leaving nothing but emotional detritus, financial ruin, and even death in her wake.  Why the author did not title the book, instead of My Friend Jim, the more accurate Awful Awful Hilda, is a reasonable question.

This novel was published originally in 1886 and its humor stands the test of time.  William Edward Norris wields a well-honed dry wit like a rapier, in such an effective style that the subtlety and delightfulness of his barbs are not lost even a century and a half later.  And after all is said and done, the story of Awful Hilda told and the detritus swept up as best as possible into a somewhat happy ending, the author finishes his little novel with one of the best final sentences in the history of fiction.

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.