These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth and early twentieth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books.

We used a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner to scan the pages, ABBYY Finereader 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak, or by TextAloud MP3 using the very good modern ScanSoft speaker. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

This process represents a large investment of time and skill. You may freely download a copy for your own use. We do not in the least mind if anybody wishes to offer any of our work on another website, but would point out that they should state that the copyright is ours, rather than claiming it as their own. They should also state that as we are constantly working to improve our texts, their readers should refer back to our version if they need to verify a text. Commercial use strictly forbidden.