The Matapan Affair

Published originally in 1881 as L’Affaire Matapan, this English translation was issue No. 1241 of The Seaside Library series published by George Munro in New York. Being too large for one edition, the novel was published on two dates one week apart, the first half on April 6, 1882, and the second half on April 13, 1882, both labeled as No. 1241.

The story of a retired pirate operating as a landlord in the Paris of 1880 is quintessentially French, with stilted, snobbish members of the nobility who are often so irritating the reader will be tempted to root for the bad guys. But patience is rewarded: there are some good ones, too, amongst that nobility, and in the end the story is entertaining and provides the reader with a satisfying ending wherein virtue triumphs over evil and true love does not remain frustrated. What more can one ask?

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.