The Boy Guide — Prentiss Ingraham

A novella-sized work of historical fiction originally published in the 1870s as a dime novel and then re-published in 1908 as a nickel weekly, The Boy Guide is number 5 of the beloved Beadle's Frontier Series which featured decent writing by reliable history buffs and better character development than most nickel weeklies. A sequel to number 2 of the series, The Young Mountaineer, this one informs the reader about what ultimately happened to Milo Clafton, the lasso-throwing young mountaineer himself, and his two friends, Jonathan Sutton and Slim Jim, who were separated from Milo at the end of the earlier story. The author manages to resolve the embarrassing conundrum in the middle of his plot caused by the Great Arizona Diamond Swindle of 1872... which, unfortunately, the author remained unaware was a swindle at the time he wrote that first book. At more than 36,000 words, this work of fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period. Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) 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.