title: The Last Aldini
author: Gravelyn, Jim
description: Written some time before 1845, in the middle of the famous author's writing career, this is a two-part romance—two different stories about two different love affairs unexpectedly and dramatically connected—narrated by a famous Italian singer (fictional) to his Bohemian stage mates one maudlin evening after a performance in Genoa, as they take turns reminiscing about past lives and past loves.  George Sand (1804–1876), real name Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, a French novelist, was one of the most popular writers in Europe during her lifetime, being more renowned than both Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac in England in the 1830s and 1840s.  Sand is recognized as one of the most notable writers of the European Romantic era.  George Munro, the New York publisher of the 1877 English-language version which served as the source for this digital book, was known for not listing the names of translators, so whether he used an already translated version from Europe or paid someone to translate the novel into English himself, the translator's name is unknown.  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.