The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims

If you like tales of chivalry, you will love those found here in The Story of the Canterbury Pilgrims.  Originally published in 1914 by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, this digital republication is a pleasant way to enjoy stories from Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c. 1343–25 October 1400) Canterbury Tales without enduring the Middle English verse in which they were written.  Many writers have redone Chaucer’s tales in Modern English but Mr. Darton has the distinction of re-using the original literary device of having pilgrims on the way to Canterbury take turns with the tale-telling so the reader can enjoy the interaction and personalities of the 14th century characters, especially the church officials, and then adds some stories by other authors— John Lydgate (c. 1370–c. 1451), for example, who was a prolific contemporary of Chaucer.

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.