Historical European Martial Arts in its Context: Single-Combat, Duels, Tournaments, Self-Defense, War, Masters and their Treatises

This seems to be a well researched book about HEMA in its context. I'm enjoying the contents of the book when I can focus on them, but the presentation is so distracting that I keep finding myself getting withdrawn from the details of the text to marvel at the poor typography choices. In a hardback book costing 50 GBP, this is not good, and this is why serious book authors should hire or bribe a designer or typographer to advise them on these matters (note: I'm neither).Examples of typography problems:Page numbers are bafflingly printed in orange, in a decorative kind of font that is also outlined. I wish I knew the thought process here. "Let's distract the reader from the actual text" perhaps? I've never seen this done before. It's usually not done for a reason.The main text is a serif font, but block quotes/passages are printed in a san serif font that clashes distractingly with the main body font. (And in at least one place some main body text has leaked into the block section.)At some points in block text, the size of the text seems to vary slightly for no reason. At other points, the text colour changes subtly (mostly in footnotes it seems).Small blocks of caption text next to images is justified, rather than left or right aligned, resulting in massive distracting gaps in some lines.I appreciate the author must have put a lot of work and research into making this book. That's why it's so frustrating to find these distractions in the final product.Make a second edition, perhaps? And pay a designer next time.

This is a great book for HEMA practitioners as well as people interested in Europe's martial arts. Obviously, Richard Marsden has put a lot of time in researching this theme (same can be said for his Polish Sabre book). No matter what discipline of HEMA you're practicing, this book will be of interest to you.Even though I believe this book deserves its 5-star score, it does have its flaws. There are a lot of anecdotes, which are by themselves quite interesting, but they do interrupt the reader from the main theme. Also, there are A LOT of pages filled with photographs from modern HEMA practitioners, which are (imho) quite irrelevant to the history of HEMA, and a bit irritating to the reader. Instead, the book would be even more appealing if Marsden had included more original pictures from the treatises.