In Production. Street date is October 1st.

PAGE turner sERIES 11

A candy lozenge, secretly infused with a quick-acting, wretched poison, is marked with an X. Who will be the one to unknowingly eat it; a hero soldier, a beloved dog, or an innocent infant?

A Passionate Love

This lost romance novel begins in England and is about young Avis Kennerly.  She is a musician and a piano teacher. Her father was almost a millionaire but lost it all and died of shock. Her mother died a few months later. Since then, she has been earning a meager living giving music lessons and a pianist for hire to entertain social home gatherings of the wealthy.  The trajectory of Avis' life took a different direction the moment she crossed paths with Marcus LeMarchant, a bigamist and murderer.

To tell you what else happened will give away some of the story. It takes place in Brighton, Victoria, Richmond, Waterloo, the London Bridge, Kensington, and Putney.

Written before most people had electricity in their homes, no telephones, or indoor running water.

No library, university, or archive holds a copy of “A Passionate Love,” and there are no known copyright records in either the United States or England. Not a single one is for sale anywhere online. The author is attributed to Charlotte M. Brame.

If funded, this startling Victorian romance will be in print for the first time in over a century.

A Lost Victorian Era Dime Novel

A Passionate Love is a romance novel that appeared briefly and then faded like a specter into the night. But who wrote it? The author is not credited by name, though the title page hints; “By the author of Her Faithful Heart.” A novel titled “Her Faithful Heart” was penned by the wildly successful English novelist Charlotte M. Brame, who was born and died in Hinckley, Leicestershire, England (November 1, 1836 – November 25, 1884).

But was A Passionate Love truly written by Brame herself? Or was it authored by one of the many writers who continued to publish under her name after her death? Could it be a retitled or alternative version of one of her novels, a lesser-known or misattributed work, or perhaps a piece of serialized fiction originally published under a different title?

This edition is a faithful reprint of the scarce original issued by Royal Publishing Company, apparently its earliest U.S. Appearance, where it was published as No. 45 in the Charles Garvice Series. The copyright, dated 1904, belonged to Kerner & Getts Company, making this publication twenty years after Brame’s death.

The Process of Creating This Book

After reading and taking detailed notes, the original copy of A Passionate Love was carefully disassembled. This copy’s binding—and therefore its value as a collectible—was sacrificed in the process. It may have been the last surviving example of this lost book, but dismantling it allowed every page to be scanned perfectly flat on a tabletop scanner.

The covers and all 230 individual pages were scanned at 600 dpi. Each image was manually corrected for skew, then renamed according to its page number. The scans were digitally edited to remove the paper’s color and texture while deepening and clarifying the printed ink.

One unique feature of A Passionate Love, compared to most dime novels of the era, is the quality of its paper. The Royal Publishing Company used stock that has aged remarkably well; still flexible, rather than brittle.

However, the original paper was a light gray and the ink a dark gray, making a true facsimile reproduction impossible. The digitally cleaned scans, though, were ideal for Adobe’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process.

The OCR software’s AI could accurately interpret even damaged text that I would otherwise have needed to study under high magnification. As is typical, the OCR output contained numerous formatting and typographical errors. Each page was carefully proofread and corrected against the original text before moving on to the next. A third reading of the original located all italicized words and identified three pages with distinctive formatting.

The final stage was to recreate the layout and formatting of the original book. This step alone took over four hours to complete. The end product will eb In total, more than twenty hours of work went into producing a print-ready version of A Passionate Love.