Maps of Gettysburg Review & Thank You

Last night at the Rocky Mountain Civil War Roundtable meeting my buddy (and blog reader) Ian D. gave me a copy of Maps of Gettysburg by Bradley M. Gottfried as a gift for the hard work I do for the roundtable (its a labor of love, I don't mind doing it, but thanks to Ian for the book).

When I got home I looked through it. Can't say that I really read it. I read some areas but I looked at nearly every map, and that's what this book is for anyway. The basic layout of the book is that the right side page has a full page map and the facing page has the text for the map. So there is no need to flip from page to page to understand a map. Of course reading more than one at a time does make the whole make more sense but its not mandatory. In other words you could open the book at random and be able to understand that map without seeing any other pages.

As the son of a cartographer I know a thing or two about maps, having been around them my entire life. These maps are pretty good. There are a few design elements I'm not crazy about but those are very minor details. I only have one complaint, no times are listed on the maps. I understand that firm times are not possible but it would be nice to know that the action being depicted is at roughly 2-4 PM on July 2nd. I don't think that sort of vagueness is impossible to ask for.

Overall I like the book and would recommend it to everyone interested in Gettysburg. I had read enough good things about it that I intended to buy a copy, Ian just beat me to it. Thanks again to Ian.

Thanks for the encouragement

Just a quick note to thank everyone for the encouragement over the last two days after my post about publishing travails. It was good to see that. I'll keep everyone posted in the future about my projects. Maybe one of them will show up in your local bookstore and you can say you knew me when I started a little blog. :)

One of the better lines of encouragement came from Laurie Chambliss's This Week in Blogs. I got a chuckle from this line: "Nick's own prospective book has hit a bump in the road due to conflicting opinions from two manuscript reviewers. We trust this is just a Lew Wallace moment and it will be straightened out shortly to make a dramatic appearance, later than expected but at just the right moment after all."

Thanks to everyone.

Thanks

I've started to see my blog mentioned on other blogs while looking around today. Thanks to everyone for the kind words. I do think I'll end up changing the title down the road but will take a month to really think it over. Its been fun blogging so far, I have a ton of pictures and stories to tell right now after a fabulous trip. After the trip posts are done I'm not sure what I'll shift into as my routine, maybe telling old trip stories, maybe posting about oddities I've found along the way, just a potpourri of things.