“The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east.”
banns: a notice read out at church on three successive Sundays.
The Great Gatsby
How we make them
There are plenty of reprints. This isn’t one.
Anyone can reprint a public domain text. It takes real research to make one understandable. That research is what you’re paying for.
We read for what stops a reader
We go through the unabridged text and note every uncommon, specialized, historical, and slang word or phrase, along with exactly how it’s used. Our books have ranged from just over 100 entries to more than 340.
We find the right definition
A dictionary gives you the meanings of a word. We need the one that fits this sentence, in this book, in this period. Often that’s quick. Sometimes one old piece of slang takes an hour or more to track down.
We identify the people and places
We note every character and every location as we go. Then we explain who they are, where a place is, and why it matters to the story.
We write the context
A historical orientation sets the scene: the society the book came from, and what its first readers already knew. A biographical article introduces the author.
We restore the book itself
We typeset the text for easy reading. Where a book has original illustrations, we find them, restore them, and put them back where the author intended. Otherwise, a skilled artist creates a cover that’s true to the story.
What that looks like on the page
Here’s the kind of problem we’re solving, in sentences from three of our books.
“There was a small spinney of larch trees just here”
spinney: a small area covered by trees or bushes.
Winnie-the-Pooh
“Bob had but fifteen ‘Bob’ a week himself”
Bob: a shilling. One name is the clerk, the other is his pay.
A Christmas Carol
New books, before anyone else hears about them
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