About Quint Books

Quint Books LLC publishes carefully annotated editions of classic literature. Our first title is a new annotated edition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad — the Quint Essential Edition.

The Quint Essential approach

Reading a book written more than 150 years ago means stumbling over people, places, events, and turns of phrase that everyone in 1869 knew without explanation. A Quint Essential Edition puts those answers directly under the eye of the modern reader without flattening the prose, the typography, or the visual experience of the original.

For The Innocents Abroad, that meant:

• Over 1,200 footnotes identifying people, places, events, and defining vocabulary on the same page where it appears.
• Eight appendixes, a lexicon, and a complete index.
• All 235 illustrations from the 1869 first edition, reproduced and placed close to their original positions in the text.
• The first edition’s page headers (which changed by topic, not by chapter) preserved as the basis for a richer Table of Contents.
• Period typography preserved — italics, ligatures, diacritics — with light, transparent editorial decisions noted where they were made.

The editor

The editor of The Innocents Abroad: The Quint Essential Edition is Philip Trauring. The blog at this site is where he shares the research, dead ends, and small discoveries that went into producing the book — from passenger lists and forgotten shipboard newspapers to the disciplined work of transcribing 19th-century handwriting.

Get in touch

If you have questions, corrections, suggestions, or ideas for future Quint Essential editions, please write to info@quintbooks.com.