“Architectura militaris nova et aucta oder newe vermehrte Fortification von Regul” by Adam Freitag is a typical 17thcentury book, meaning that is composed of text pages and full-page drawings alike. The cover is richly decorated and shows two women, probably learning about architecture. It also shows the topic of this book: The fortification of cities and buildings, with its typical star-like arrangement of walls.
Every chapter begins with a large, decorated capital letter and a little drawing on top of the page which has nothing to do with the topic itself. It rather is a “grotesque” or an “arabesque”. The text is written without any distractions in between, expect for occasional illustrations spread across two pages. They take over the whole page and are huge, yet they never interfere with the text itself. Furthermore, there are page numbers and the number of the book on top of the page (e.g. 61, “das erste Buch”). Occasionally, chapter titles are also present, such as “Von Regular-Festungen”.
When it comes to illustrations, they are presented in a very important demeanor. As written before, they are always scaled up to a double page and the page before and after are blank. My guess is, that they didn’t want to risk destroying the drawing with ink coming through the page. Because there are no drawings in between texts, illustrations are numbered, like fig. 118. That makes it easier, to explain the specific drawing in the text.
The drawings are perspectives and layouts/floor plans most of the times. It is obvious however, that they haven’t yet started drawing with axes and a horizon, as the illustrations tend to be bent. Frequently, drawings are accompanied by tables to further explain the point of the topic. All of this makes the book seem like an academic study, with a lot of thoughts and research behind it.
I was assigned a NEW book because the OCR didn’t run properly. It is called “The Stones of Venice” by Ruskin and was published in the 19th century. As suggested by its name, the author examined Venice in detail. Compared to my original book, it has definitely less images and feels like a normal book concerning size and font.