François Blondel wrote the book «Nouvelle Maniere de Fortifier les places» in 1688. Translated to English, the title of François Blondel’s book means “new way of fortifying places”. If you also take the background of the author into account, he probably wrote the book as a theoretical text about architectural spaces. The author was at the time the book was written one of the most important theorists of rational architecture and held lectures twice per week at the Académie des sciences in Paris. Assuming by the success of François Blondel’s publications and the title, his “new way of fortifying places” probably contained innovative architectural concepts which have not been published before he had written the book in 1688.
As you can see in the first pages, the book is addressed to the king of France, who at the time was Louis XIV. This makes the book seem even more important and official. The fact that the book is still relevant to this day proofs that the authors success and importance was justified
There are only a few illustrations and pictures at the very end of the book to show some of the architectural concepts. The book itself is very small in its size, so some of the illustrations can be unfolded to be larger than the actual pages. Without reading the book most of the illustrations are hard to understand but I assume that they show some of his concepts and ideas about the use of space in architecture.