Grand unified books thread

[Sophie Scholl]

Recently finished an excellent and thought-ptoking book, Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons....

That sounds amazing! I'll definitely add that to my Amazon wishlist. Appreciate the quality review. 

[The Brain]

Today I received The Art of Lone Wolf. I've always loved the illustrator Gary Chalk, and Lone Wolf is one of the many things he's worked on. Nice.

[Syt]

Nice one. Gary Chalk only did the first couple of books, though, IIRC? He did have a quite distinctive artstyle.

[The Brain]

Nice one. Gary Chalk only did the first couple of books, though, IIRC? He did have a quite distinctive artstyle.

Books 1-8 according to the back cover. NB I don't think I played them all back in the day.

[The Brain]

They seem to have left out the covers though. Sad. I assume to keep down printing costs.

[Syt]

I used to have the books up till 12, I don't think the later ones were published in Germany when I was into them. I keep telling myself I will replay them over on https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Home but I've yet to progress further than #4 

[Josquius]

I don't know what came of it but I remember a decade ago there was a project to translate them into a video game format.
I have a bunch at home - I think I miss a few key numbers and played them all out of order since I just picked them up where I found them.
It was very good. In lieu of a chance for table top rpgs it's the closest I got.

[ulmont]

They seem to have left out the covers though. Sad. I assume to keep down printing costs.

I think the covers were governed by different sets of rights - Project Aon has all the Gary Chalk illustrations but doesn't have the covers either, and the covers were also different country to country.

[Syt]

FWIW these were the German covers. Looking up English versions, there seem to be various covers for some books.

[Syt]

Also, one thing I loved was the continuity. "Oh yeah, that thing you picked up 4 books ago? Super useful right now!"

[The Brain]

I love how the book is 2nd edition and there's still a lot of typos. And one classic "xxx - Text for the image goes here". The art is great obviously and the text doesn't matter much, but maybe they should have spent 5 more minutes on the book as a book.

[The Brain]

I'm reading 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, by McLynn. It seems mostly okayish so far, I like that it describes the background of the different actors going back several decades. But sometimes he seems weirdly accepting of unlikely-sounding stories, while at other times he is soundly skeptical. The most bizarre thing so far though is that he calmly states that Norway had a population of 2 million at the time, and Normandy 1 million. These sound like complete fantasy, and yet he doesn't comment further on these extreme numbers or how he arrived at them. The book isn't new, it's from 1998, but that doesn't explain anything here.

[Oexmelin]

1M for Normandy doesn't sound so extreme. The region has extremely well preserved fiscal documents which, by their nature, if anything, under report taxable communities. In the 13th century, where we have really detailed sourced, number of fiscal units ("households") was placed at 307,000 or so, which demographers usually multiply by 5 to get a crude estimate of population. In the 12th century, that number of households was put at 136,000, which either suggest the population more than doubled, which seems unlikely, or were generally under reported. From this, estimates for 12th century place the population at somewhere around 900,000.

2M for Norway sounds crazy though. It was well below 1M in the 16th c.

[Agelastus]

A quick google online suggests that the 2 million figure could be a typo for two hundred thousand.

[The Brain]

Yeah, the number for Normandy may be on the high side but the one for Norway is just crazy. He mentions that medieval Scandinavia during this period of mild climate was able to support "a considerable population", and that "...Norway seems to have been able to feed a population in excess of two million by the eleventh century". Hopefully it's just an extra zero that crept in during the manuscript stage.