The text in Hans Blumens “Des berühmten Meister Hans Blumen von Lor am Mäin Nuzlichs Säulenbuch“ is composed in various ways. The title page and the pages that signal new chapters are designed very artistically with a rather decorative font. The text in the book sometimes covers whole pages without an image interrupting it, sometimes the text is divided by an illustration into two parts, and sometimes the text is organised in columns on the one side of a page whereas on the other side there is as well an image.
In the first part of the book the illustrations are mostly detailed architectural drawings of the different orders of the columns which obviously is the topic of the book. In the second part Hans Blumen shows many elaborately drawn perspective views of some antique buildings.
The images are equally distributed but very differently presented throughout the book. There are some close-up drawings of some explicit parts of the columns such as the capital or the architrave that are used as in-text images, but there are also illustrations of the entire column that clearly won’t fit on just one single page, so they are organised as foldout spreads. The images that give information about the columns accompany the text in the first part of the, whereas the perspective views of the buildings are all at the end of the book without any further comments.
The illustrations of the first part of the book are referenced and mentioned with letters in the describing text to ensure that the reader correctly links the right information to the right image.
The images have an at least equally important role as the text because first of all, they take in the same amount of space as the text and second of all, without the illustration the reader wouldn’t be able to fully understand the information and the meaning of Hans Blumens work. And also, the organisation of the text suggests the use for academic studies because of these detailed drawings and this exact descriptions of the columns in the text.