Professor Pin

A diminutive and socially awkward professor, upon the closing of the college where he works, accepts a similar position at another college where he experiences disdain, distrust, dismay, and even physical destruction before his competence, integrity, and Christian goodness eventually win him the adulation and friendship of students and community.  Like all of Mrs. Lee’s work, Professor Pin, originally published in 1899, is thoroughly enjoyable, ultimately satisfying, and finishes with one of her trademark emotional endings guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes.  Her fiction—albeit with a touch more credit to our Savior, Jesus Christ—is highly reminiscent of Horatio Alger’s novels in tone, plot, and structure; but please don’t make the mistake of thinking the comparison with her more famous contemporary places Mrs. Frank Lee in an unfavorable light.  If anything, Mr. Alger is the one who suffers by the comparison.

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.