When I first read Les Miserables it was in a translation from the 1800s (pretty sure it was the Isabel Florence Hapgood translation), in two volumes with the second volume’s pages mostly uncut. It had been printed in the 1890s. I really liked the translation, much better than the Fahnestock and MacAfee, but it doesn’t stand up on Gutenberg—it was probably the Old Book Smell effect.
I am still not sure how the hell these books got into my high school library. It’s not like it was a nice library with rare nineteenth-century editions of famous books on every other shelf; they pretty much assumed that what you wouldn’t Google, you had the public library for. I am, however, completely charmed that no one before me in the hundred years of the book’s existence had ever made it through the second half.
