Garret Grain; or, The House Blessed

The best novel by the greatest author you never heard of.  Mrs. Frank Lee’s work fell into obscurity while arguably-less-talented contemporaries of this genre, like Horatio Alger and George Alfred Henty, achieved fame, but with this and other eBook republications of her work the error is being corrected.  Originally published in 1894 and probably her first novel, Garret Grain might be the best thing she ever wrote.  The story follows the fortunes and foibles of a family living in a house blessed by a runaway slave woman who was sheltered in the home’s garret and nursed back to health by the family’s ancestors.  Through the years, the slave woman’s blessing has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  “Garret Grain” becomes the family motto, a constant reminder of the Christian life to which they aspire and a rallying cry for whenever their human frailties threaten to make them come up short of their aspirations.  Every page of this book is fairly dripping with wisdom, and Mrs. Lee’s insight into the human condition is so constant and so plentiful that the reader is eventually in danger of taking it for granted.

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.