Maps

In my mind, maps and illustrations are important elements of every book that I buy. If, for instance, it’s not an action that I am familiar with, maps are absolutely indispensable to understanding the action. Here’s an example of what I mean here. Some months ago, I wrote a review of a recent book on the Battle of Bentonville. Bentonville, a favorite of mine, is a large and complex action. One of my favorite Civil War books of the past decade or so is Mark L. Bradley’s excellent Last Stand in the Carolinas: The Battle of Bentonville. One of the things that makes this book so good is the inclusion of a superb and extremely detailed map series by Mark Anderson Moore, who does some of the finest maps of anyone in the business. Some of Mark Moore’s maps can be found on the Bentonville Battleground’s web site. Mark Moore’s maps are so good, in fact, that the map series was published as a separate volume, which is indispensable to anyone wanting to stomp the battlefield. Not surprisingly, both of these books were published by Savas Publishing, Ted Savas’ prior publishing venture.

The same thing also holds true for Chris Fonvielle’s terrific study of the Wilmington Campaign, which also features a large and remarkable map series by Mark Moore. Again, Mark Moore’s maps were published in a separate volume this is similarly indispensable to touring the sites associated with the campaign.

By contrast, Broadwater’s book, which was published by the Mercer University Press, by comparison, does not contain a single map. If I did not (a) have Mark Moore’s maps available to me and (b) have some familiarity with it from touring the battlefield with Mark Bradley twice, there is absolutely no way that I could have made heads or tails out of Broadwater’s book. That this book was published by a respected university press makes it all the more stunning that there isn’t a single map in this book.

I tend to follow the philosophy of Ted Savas, of Savas-Beatie Publishing, which is that one can never have enough maps in a book. That’s the primary reason why I approached Ted to publish my forthcoming work on the Battle of Monroe’s Crossroads–Ted was wiling to go with my entire map series, which is something like 25 maps. We do the same thing at Ironclad–within reason, I will let the authors have carte blanche on maps, even if it does add pages to the book. I would rather have more pages with lots of good, usable maps than a smaller, cheaper book that LOOKS cheaper because we scrimped on important things like maps.

I have always believed that good maps are absolutely essential to making a book usable to the user, and the more good maps, the better. Cutting back on maps to save pages is the sort of corner-cutting that makes me absolutely crazy. I tip my hat to Ted for doing things the right way.

Tomorrow, I will address the issue of illustrations.