De Re Militari | Book Reviews

Louis Ph.Sloos (ed.)

Warfare and the Age of Printing: Catalogue of Early Printed Books from before 1801 in Dutch Military Collections

Leiden: Brill, 2008. 4 vols.: 2,006 pages total (664+504+760+78pp) ISBN-13: 978 90 04 17241 8. €595 / US$899

When the box with this 'book' arrived and it weighed over 15lbs., I wondered what was going on? Had they sent other books with it, or multiple copies? No, it is one magnificent, four-volume set that is slip-cased and comes in at over two thousand pages. For the bibliophile, this is a fabulous work, and indeed one can see that this is a set produced by bibliophiles for bibliophiles. In terms of typography and organization it is the sort of catalogue that one would expect from the nineteenth more than the twenty-first century (and that is a good thing, in my estimation). The editor and his team is to be deeply congratulated on this splendid catalogue of the printed military books.

First, a word on the lavishness of the volumes. Each volume is bound in crisp gold/bronze toned cloth with both red and gold stamped lettering. They all have a silk ribbon in the faux-sewn binding (it is a high-quality glued square binding on an internal spine that looks like a sewn edge). Page layout is based around a 3-column format in the catalogue, with a 2-column-wide text block for the essays, using the remaining column for captions and glosses. One can even see their love of books and book production by the fact that the final page of each volume is a colophon—and headed as such—with copyrights and credits, and the colophon is even included in the index! In many ways, they have recreated a volume that typographically would be at home on the shelf of a fine library a century or more ago and the volumes are a joy to peruse, even if you did not care about military books.

 

Organization of Warfare in the Age of Printing Volume I Military dictionaries encyclopedias, general works Army organizations, regulations. instructions, military law Art of war, strategy, general tactics, defense, offense, etc. Military periodicals Infantry (including fencing) Cavalry (including equitation and veterinary science) Artillery (including equipment, gunpowder. pyrotechnics etc.) Fortification (including engineering) VOLUME II Navy (including VOC, maritime works, navigation, ship-building, etc.) Works on several armed forces Civic guards, citizen guards and militia Military history, military biography Miscellaneous military works Mathematics physics, natural history. architecture and technology VOLUME III Geography, countries, topography, ethnography (including atlases) Dutch history, biography (including periodical documents) Foreign history, biography (including ancient and classical history and periodical documents) Political science and (war) law Philosophy, morals, theology Linguistics. Literature Arts General encyclopedias etc. Bibliography, library catalogues, etc. Periodicals (including proceedings of learned societies) VOLUME IV -- Indices (corporate) authors, editors. compilers, translations anonymous titles publishers, printers, engravers and booksellers place names

De Re Militari Readers, of course, do care about military books. These three volumes (indeed, there are 4, but I'm ignoring the slim and simple index volume) have over 10,000 books in 12 languages from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. While these volumes are short on strictly medieval military volumes, there are large lists of books that are obviously themselves looking at medieval military history. And if we remember that technically DRM's mandate extends up to the Thirty Years' War, there is a great deal of material catalogued here of interest.

The work has been produced in English (that is, the essays and apparatus are in English) to reach the widest international audience. Its scope, as evidenced by both its massive nature and the organizational structure of the three main volumes (see breakdown at right), is nothing short of universal. The editors have combined the catalogues of 9 military libraries in the Netherlands, but this is no mere concatenated catalogue like the National Union Catalogue of US and Canadian libraries. Louis Sloos is the curator librarian of the Royal Netherlands Army Museum in Delft, but also a historian of book studies, so this catalogue is even more a work of bibliographic history, with each book in the volume catalogued as only rare book librarians can do (see an example entry below).

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This work, however, is not for rare book librarians alone: Sloos and his team of 10 specialists have categorized the works to put these books into context. The opening two chapters are largely bibliographic in nature, giving brief histories of the various repositories and the library system that constitute the catalogue, and broad analyses of military printing from 1531 (the earliest book in the combined Dutch collections; it's Rusio's Hippiatria sive marescaliaIon on equine diseases) to 1801, followed by a chapter on the development of the Dutch military. While this latter section is only 25-pages long, it does bring this under-studied military force into the light. Footnotes (actually "side-notes", as they are in the outer margins as glosses were in incunabula) lead you to the standard surveys and reference works for further information. The numbering system is very straight–forward, with each entry assigned a number of the form XXYYY, with XX being the section number, and YYY the entry within it (E.g., 07012, Joseph Furttenbach's Halinitro-pyrobolia [1627], is number 12 in §7, 'Artillery'). Each of the subsections in the catalogue, however, is arranged chronologically for ease of use, but none of those sections contain any introductory information or any attempt to contextualize of the range of works catalogued in them—are there works in the section which are unitque to Dutch holdings? Are there particularly interesting examples in these holdings of otherwise widely-held works? Has anyone done a survey of equestrian manuals or military medicine, for example? If there is a weakness, this is it, for the sections, even the replete ones, would be so much more useful if the reader could have some access to any extant secondary literature as they have done in the general introduction. Even a paragraph or two at the start of the section would have been appreciated. Some sections have many hundreds of works (§2 "Army organization, regulations, instructions, and military law", for example, has 336 and §15 "Geography" has 353), while others are quite tiny (§21 on "Arts" has only 15), but all are copiously illustrated with a section of title-pages or plates from the books in the section.

The level of illustration of the work in fact deserves special mention. Although this book is done on regular (non-clayed) paper, there are numerous color images throughout the volumes. Each volume has a few dozen color images in the opening pages (vol. III, for example, has 40 pages of color images, mostly on Geography) and the occasional color image also shows up within the catalog sections as well, all of which demonstrate the range of aesthetic quality within these military books. Most of the plates throughout the volumes are in regular, though high-resolution grayscale, but many that are themselves black-ink engravings on the page have been reproduced as one would see them, in the warm yellow-tan tones of aged paper. Their reproduction is crisp and each is clearly keyed to the bibliographic entry from which it came. While obviously these images remain copyright of the respective institutions which hold the volumes and of Brill in particular, as a lecturer, I must make the observation that this is a fabulous repository for your fair-use imagery for class lectures or conference papers, and of course then should you need to publish the image, you know exactly which institution holds it to write for permissions.

(click any of the images for a larger image)

         

Since this catalogue is based upon Dutch holdings, it is obviously not as absolutely complete as would be a European or worldwide catalogue, though it comes close. And as you might imagine, there are thousands of books in Dutch that probably had rather limited distribution outside the Low Countries, especially for the earlier works. It is also worth nothing that while we often recognize that the Benelux region has been "Europe's battlefield" from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, her libraries have not suffered nearly the depredations as have other countries, so the holdings catalogued here are particularly replete and contain a number of fully unique survivals.

In terms of usability, it is interesting to contemplate a set of volumes like this in the twenty-first century. Looking at the index volume in particular made me realize that in general we (or I, at least) haven't scanned through a printed index for some time. We are all so used to keyword searching to find the one nugget we are looking for, that being faced with a multi-page list of, for example, anonymous titles, seems a little overwhelming. Of course all these indices are useful, but it made me consider why I loved this set so much. First, I am a bibliophile (the first step to curing it is admitting it, as my wife reminds me) so as much as online databases and Google™ are wonderful, there is something visceral at browsing page by page (and I would note that eBook readers still tacitly acknowledge that the interaction with text is still best understood, both cognitively and hapticly, in codex mode) and feeling the weight of the volume in your hands. Some people even viscerally like the smell of new book pages. And these volumes are, as I have said, a tribute to that mode of interaction with information.

But, I asked myself, could this volume have been a CD-ROM, or an online-database? Of course it could have been, and Brill's experience with the bibliographies of military history by DeVries or Hacker have shown that such approaches do work. Yet I am still a great believer that there still need to be reference library repositories out there. If for nothing else, massive cataloging projects like this cannot hope to be purchased by individuals due to their price. And similarly, large catalogs on CD, although inexpensive to produce, still demand a hefty price. But more than that, I am willing to say that this set of volumes should not have been "just" a CD, even though the possibility existed to make it one. As a bibliographic reference about books, it itself should be a book. The point of access and searchability should not be just searching by keywords; readers should be scanning the lists by context to understand relationships between the items, not to just identify an item in question. More fully, 'users' should be 'readers': not merely taking in information, but processing and interpreting it as well. This multi-volume codex set facilitates that.

So as you can tell, I am a great fan of this set. Of course there are drawbacks to it such as the cost, the foot of shelf space it takes up, and the fact that even if you find some important and rare text listed within it you will still have to get to the Netherlands to see it (oh, the hardship... Vlaamse frites for all!), though I have no complaints about production qualities or editorial problems. Given its cost I cannot in good faith recommend that individuals will want to rush out and purchase it—and besides, given our disciplinarily, only a few subsections will likely be useful to military historians (as compared to military bibliographers)—, but I can say that any university with any military history faculty should make sure that their reference libraries have this volume. As an aid to understanding the trajectory of military printing from 1500-1800, this is in indispensible set; as a product of a publishing house, this is a marvelous set; and as the result of a nine-year long project of this editorial team, this is a monumental set.

Steven A. Walton

Penn State University <[email protected]>