The Death Shot
Book details
- Title
- The Death Shot
- Publication year listed
- 1873
- Format
- Public domain eBook
- Reading access
- Free online reader; no registration required
- Source record
- View on Archive.org
About this book
The Death Shot
Author: Captain Thomas Mayne Reid (1818-83)
Year: 1873
This was quite a difficult book to transcribe. There were the usual difficulties with this author--his frequent use of words in Spanish, or the Mexican variety of Spanish, of words in French. In addition it must have been something of an experimental writing, for it is generally in the present tense, and there was frequent use made of new words that have not survived in the language. Much, indeed almost all, of the speech is uttered by uneducated persons, so that it needs perseverance, sometimes, to make out what is being said. Probably most of the speakers would not have been able to read, and would not have known how to pronounce the words they uttered. Added to all that the proof-reading, particularly towards the end of the book, left much to be desired, quite common words having letters missing or all jumbled up. Finally, the copy used was in a bad way, not from over-use, but from bad binding. It fell apart completely, and we had to continue the work on a scanner that can only read books that have been reduced to single pages. We do not need to mention the problem usual with cheaply made books of that period, that punctuation marks, especially commas and full-stops, and especia