If you’ve been around my blog or following me on Goodreads for a while, you probably know how I love old books. Classics, of course, but I also love discovering the charming “hidden gems” of yesterday’s popular fiction. This began for me when I first got a Kindle, and discovered how many public-domain books that I’d never even heard of were available for free as ebooks. As I got better acquainted with the public domain, though, I discovered that there were even more books that hadn’t made it to easy-access platforms like Kindle or Project Gutenberg. They’re available, in places like Internet Archive, but often in hard-to-read scanned editions that are full of glitches and typos. It’s pleasing yet frustrating to find another book by a favorite author and have to struggle through error-ridden pages where you spend half the time guessing what the words are supposed to be.
I’ve long daydreamed about “rescuing” some of these obscure books by producing clean, readable ebook editions. And last month I made my first experiment in that direction, with a short story by Booth Tarkington, The Spring Concert. I cleaned up the text, using the photo scan version at Internet Archive for comparison; I formatted it for Kindle. I even put my slowly-improving Gimp skills to use and made the cover myself. And for a finishing touch, I included a few of the original black-and-white illustrations from the story’s first magazine appearance in 1916.
But I’m even more excited about my second public-domain venture. Remember I mentioned in one of my weekend roundups that I’d discovered a treasure-trove of old fiction magazine archives? I immediately began looking through them for stories by favorite authors, initially just with the idea of reading them (using the FictionMags index for reference). At the top of my list was B.M. Bower. Though her pre-1924 novels are widely-available in the public domain, she wrote dozens of short stories for magazines, most of which have never been republished in book form. And so…
The Girl From Kilpatrick’s and Other Stories on Kindle
Here is the result: a collection of eight B.M. Bower short stories originally published in magazines between 1903 and 1907, which haven’t seen the light of day since!
If you’re like me and enjoy Bower’s novels, you’ll be delighted with these stories too. (My own personal favorites are “At the Gray Wolf’s Den,” “The Sheepherder” and “Pecos the Peeler,” but I enjoyed them all.) Each story stands alone, but Bower fans will recognize the lead characters in a couple of them from supporting or cameo roles in the Flying U series. Since it’s not my own work, aside from the formatting and design, I’ve put only the most nominal price of 99¢ on the ebook—and speaking in a strictly literary sense, that’s a pretty darn good bargain for eight good stories like this!
Do I have more “lost treasures” in mind for rescue? Absolutely! I don’t have any schedules or timeframe (cleaning up the text and formatting is rather tedious and exhausting work, so one can’t make a steady diet of it), but I definitely have some more titles in mind, and next on the list are some lesser-known works by another Western author. Stay tuned!
Good for you! It’s a worthy project to keep old stories alive for new generations. I love the stories that appeared in magazines as serials, especially the ones from The Strand ( Edith Nesbit’s tales are always fun reads ). Thank you for mentioning FictionMags because I wasn’t aware of that resource and have been using books like “The Index to the Strand” to find a listing of authors and what issues their stories appeared in. I’m not familiar with Bower so I’ll definitely check out her writing. I wish you good sales on your book!
Thanks! I love Nesbit’s children’s books (The Railway Children and The Magic City are my favorites), but I haven’t read any of her fiction for adults yet—but her novel The Lark is on my summer reading list for this year!
How marvelous Elisabeth! I can’t stand to think of the stories of those grand authors being lost in archives of history. I’m so glad you are republishing them (and in so doing, preserving them for posterity).
Oh, and the cover on this book is lovely. That cowgirl picture has always been a favorite!
Best of wishes with all your future projects! I’d love to see Gene Rhodes “forgotten” newspaper/magazine stories done up in an eBook (or book!) as well!
That’s one of the main reasons I’m enthusiastic about doing this—there’s a lot of books and stories that are too good to be hidden away unseen and unknown! And as for future projects…wow, you guessed it in one. 🙂
Oh, that’s so exciting! Any paperback plans in the working for these authors?
Not just yet…mainly because I’m not sure how far my cover design skills will take me. 🙂 But we’ll see.