Derek Nudd's Blog - Posts Tagged "innes-mccartney"

Jutland 1916: The Archaeology of a Naval Battlefield by Innes Mccartney

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Innes McCartney combines professional use of historical records with fifteen years' maritime archaeology to tease new insights from the rapidly deteriorating wrecks at the bottom of the North Sea. In the process he developed new techniques to identify class of vessel from the often partial and degraded remains.

The book itself is well produced: hardback, nicely printed on heavy 245x190mm paper. My main whinge is over the design. Squeezing the charts, a vital element, into landscape presentation within over-wide margins makes them unneccessarily difficult to read. They deserve to be full-page and have better colour separation. Using black text on blue boxes for captions probably looks OK on screen but doesn't translate well to print. Switching randomly from black-on-white pages to white-on-black may help the underwater photos to stand out but I for one found it jarring. The overall effect was as though the publisher had given the project to an intern to finish off.

A pity. Losing style points in my opinion (others may disagree) does not detract from the value of the content. I will be returning to this book time and again. Perhaps with a magnifying-glass.



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