The Strange Adventures of a House-Boat
William Black, Jim Gravelyn
This digital version includes 18 illustrations from the original book, quality drawings by an uncredited artist. The title is an echo title, Mr. Black apparently trying to capitalize upon the success of The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872), published sixteen years earlier, with this similarly titled work of travel fiction.
William Black was a very popular and successful novelist while he was alive, whose fame for some reason did not maintain itself into the 20th century. But whether accorded modern-era critical acclaim or not, readers of William Black novels will enjoy themselves enough to understand why they were so popular at the time they were published. There is nothing better than a good romantic novel—and God help us if we ever reach a point as a species when such is not the case.
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.
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