Hi, I printed a full-color proof copy for myself, it cost about $70. It looks really nice - I'm really amazed at the quality of the images, the paintings and so on, as they appear on the page, Lulu really has their shit together.
The only problem really, other than a few typos, is it's quite big. I guess not too ridiculous for a coffee table book but it's a bit heavy to hold in your hands. It's around 400 pages.
I am thinking now of splitting it into two volumes. The part I've been revising the most is in the first 250 pages or so. As a separate volume it would drop the printing cost to around $45, which is more manageable, and the book itself physically will be easier to handle. I have to think it over though since it's kind of a big thing, if I split it I'll have to do that for the PDF too but I can still make both volumes available on the download.
I also, in a way I guess is typical in the nature of things, stumbled across 5 or 6 really interesting sources on history from this era: a bunch of details and art about 2 late medieval cavalry societies, a first-hand account of a Teutonic Knights raid or '
reysa' into Lithuania, and transcription / English translation of a bunch of records from the Hanseatic League including documentation that Paul Benecke, the Danzig city councilor and privateer, captured the mayor of London on a ship in 1461. Love that stuff. I really need to transcribe these excerpts and add them to the book, this kind of primary source stuff is so much more valuable than anything I can write, I feel like I owe it to the reader to put it in there.
I just finished a lecture for IGX, the video of it should be online pretty soon. I think it went well. Anyway this frees me up to work on the Baltic book again, hopefully one more push the next few days and I can put out another cool revision update and maybe also split it into two volumes. If I manage that I'll put it on Lulu and put the link on there in case you or anyone else wants to order it.
http://www.irongateexhibition.com/speak ... -chandler/This was the intro to my lecture:
https://irongateexhibition2016.sched.org/event/8QLM/hunting-warlike-festivals-and-martial-sports-how-the-people-of-medieval-central-europe-prepared-for-war-and-why-its-so-different-from-training-in-the-late-classical-and-early-modern-eras?iframe=yes&w=&sidebar=yes&bg=no#?iframe=yes&w=i:100;&sidebar=yes&bg=noHistories of the art of war often have a big gap right where the middle ages should be. When we try to understand how people trained for war and personal conflict in the armies of the 30 Years War or the wars of Justinian, we can recognize certain commonalities with today: Drill, marching, strict discipline, techniques of repetition and rote memorization, these are familiar in the boot camp of a modern army or an MMA school. But medieval society was very different, and therefore a lot harder for us to understand. All too often, this means that like the fight-books themselves, the very context of training in the medieval period has been simply ignored.
In the fight books of the Liechtenauer and related traditions, we notice certain stylistic differences between the medieval period and the Early Modern. Before we can really crack the persistent mysteries surrounding just where these manuals and the people who wrote them fit into the societies they came from, we need to understand what war and personal conflict meant in those societies, and how they approached training more generally. Though there is a great deal of continuity, there are also sharp differences between the social structures of the late medieval and Early Modern eras. From 1420 to 1620, more than just fashions had changed in Central Europe - it's about more than poofy pants!
This presentation will attempt to scratch the surface of what precisely made the medieval period so different in it's pedagogy, style, and inherent assumptions related to training. We will explore how the people of late medieval Central Europe prepared themselves collectively for war, and individually for personal conflict. We will show how this preparation differed in many ways from what we think of as military and martial arts training today, and from the Late Classical and Early Modern eras which bookended the medieval period. Finally, we will touch upon how the differences in style in medieval vs. Early Modern fencing manuals reflect deeper pedagogical and philosophical shifts between these time periods and the social fabric that defined them.