Choosing Images

Those who are familiar with my work know that I firmly believe that no book can ever have too many maps or too many illustrations. I’ve been busy the past couple of days selecting the images to use in the Brandy Station book. I get a total of 55 of them, and I have to save some of them for the tour portion of the book. There will be 12 maps, which leaves me approximately 37 images of the participants to use in the book. I usually end up with a few more Union images than Confederate simply because Union images are easier to find, but I try to keep the ratio at about 55-45%.

After 15 books, I’ve accumulated a large collection of images of my own. Also, the entire Brady collection of the Library of Congress–more than 2000 images–is available, and in high resolution scan format. Finding high-quality images has become a much easier and much more enjoyable task than it used to be. It used to be something that I absolutely dreaded, largely because I hated spending hours hunched over the scanner. I’ve already got good digital images of a large percentage of the ones that I want to use in the Brandy book, so it will probably only take an hour or two at the most to complete the task of scanning the ones that I need.

This is the fun part of the process for me. I don’t recall ever having the illustrations for one of my books nailed down as early as these are. It’s nice not having to worry about it for a change.