Michael Robartes And The Dancer

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”  Such was the apocalyptic observation of William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865–28 January 1939), Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, as he observed the horror and inhumanity of World War I and its aftermath, as well as the failed, concurrent Easter Rising in his own Ireland.  Originally published in 1920, after he had entered his mystical phase but before he had become a two-term senator of the Irish Free State, this little volume of poetry is a reflection of the times, of Yeats’s personal life, and of his submersion into the occultish philosophy he was formulating from his communication with spirits and “instructor” guides through automatic writing.

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.