Update on Twin Commonwealth Publishing Order

A week or so ago, I posted here about Twin Commonwealth Publishing, a company and web site that I had not been aware of until Drew Wagenhoffer posted about it on his blog.

After checking out Drew’s post, I went to the Twin Commonwealth web site and reviewed all of the offerings. While their list of Civil War selections is still pretty small, they’ve got some really rare and really interesting stuff. It’s all really rare stuff, much of which I’ve never seen available anywhere else. As I’ve mentioned here previously, I’m working on research to do a book on Morgan’s Indiana and Ohio Raid of 1863, and am always on the lookout for material that’s pertinent. I found a work by Basil W. Duke titled _A Romance of Morgan’s Rough Riders: The Raid_ listed there. I was marginally aware of this publication, which is terribly rare. It’s actually three pieces combined–one by Duke, one by Thomas Hines on the escape from the Ohio Penitentiary, and a third about other aspects of the raid. These articles evidently were originally published in _The Century_ magazine but did not make their way into _Battles and Leaders of the Civil War_(as many articles didn’t). The book was only $10.95, which was certainly reasonable, even if is only a 75 page book.

Twin Commonwealth uses a print-on-demand printing company called Lulu.com to do their printing. Print-on-demand, not surprisingly, means that something is printed only when an order is received, and it also means that things are generally not maintained in inventory. That I had book in hand less than two weeks after placing a print-on-demand order speaks highly for both Lulu and for Twin Commonwealth.

I immediately ordered the book, which arrived today. It’s perfect bound (that’s softcover for those of you not up on publishing lingo), but it’s clean. The originals were scanned and cleaned up, and the images came through pretty well. There’s one bad one–a photo of Morgan–that’s all rasterized, but the rest of them came through quite nicely. The book is only 75 pages, and there’s not much in the way of cover art. However, I’m very pleased with the overall product, and am glad that I purchased it, as it makes for a good primary source addition to my Morgan’s Raid research.

According to the web site, Twin Commonwealth is constantly adding new titles. There are also a number of interesting Revolutionary War titles listed in their catalog, and I am interested in pursuing more of those. In short, I will be placing further orders with Twin Commonwealth in the future.

Thanks again to Drew Wagenhoffer for tipping me off about the existence of this company.