The book starts with an introduction on the topic, a key for all the forms and abbreviations used in the book and an Index for each city that Nicolas de Fer has made an analysis of its fortification.
The rest of the book is built up on the same scheme: for every city there is a single page, ,there is no text on the back of the pages with the images, so one city uses a double page. On every one of these pages, there is a big map of the analyzed city’s fortification, a small commentary describing the city (about 15 lines), mostly in one of the corners, a scale for the map and a compass with a North Arrow. Further, there sometimes is a small frame that dedicates this analysis to Paris as well as an index on what the letters on the maps used mean.
On some pages, the commentary is ornamented with figures of humans and angels, armor and weapons or a coat of arms. There is a possible connection between the city and these ornaments.
The images on the pages are always aerial views of the ground plan of the fortifications and use the most part of the pages and are not numbered but referred by city name. The text is only a commentary to the images and is handwritten in a small-sized font.
The images with the texts are painted on separate pages and then glued in the book. Due to the difference of the format of book and page (about A4), there is a margin of about 5cm around the images on the bigger book pages.
The organization and layout of the book as well as the hierarchy between images and text clearly underlines that the importance relies on the study of the maps and not on the accompanying commentary. Therefore the book is a reference on how fortifications are built and where each typology makes the most sense. It has a use in city building as well as a possible use in the military or navy.
(Due to the handwriting of the author I had to use a different book for the conversation to text with OCR)