Jane's Fighting Ships 1904. (Naval Encyclopedia and Year Book)

Ever since its first edition in 1898, Jane's Fighting Ships has been the go-to information source for navalists. As a result past issues of Jane's are an irreplaceable source of contemporaneous perspectives on the world's navies. Flipping through Jane's for 1898 or 1906 or 1939, you are seeing through the eyes of history. Unfortunately, most past editions are no longer in print and can only be obtained via interlibrary loan, which can be slow and unreliable, or by purchasing used, which are scarce and expensive (starting at typically about double the list price of these volumes).

To fill the gap, this is a facsimile edition produced from the best available scan. No hardcopy was available at the time of publication.  Of the 604 pages in the scan, 10 were considered so deficient that they should not be included. They were replaced with blank pages, and glaring scanning artifacts on other pages were obscured. All pages were then subjected to a "preflight" image manipulation that increased page size from the scanned size of approximately 7.8 x 9" (page sizes vary in the scan) to an 11 x 8.5 landscape format. The preflight also programmatically removed excess white space from the margins. The net effect is that the 594 content-bearing facsimile pages are easier to read and larger than their scanned progenitors. Because of a printer's limitation of no more than 400 pages for this trim size, the books were broken into two volumes, this first one containing the front matter and the navies of England, France, Germany, and Russia.

The complete PDF was then passed through an "AI" text summarization tool which produced concise summaries of each page. The page summaries are provided as a whole in the front matter and comprise about 40 pages split over the two volumes Reasonable minds may differ, of course, but I find that skimming these purely textual summaries provides some informational benefit to the reader; ir is a different experience from flipping through the image-laden complexity of the original layouts, and tends to highlight important points.

Caveats registered, I hope you will enjoy this edition of Jane's as much as I did.  It's full of unexpected gems, from the typography in the ads (I just love "Phosphor Bronze" on Page 1) to the ahead-of-its-time multimedia approach with pages that combine maps, photographs, sketches, and text. It is a glimpse into a bygone world, captured shortly before the beginning of the Dreadnought naval arms race that foreshadowed the calamity of the First World War. An essential purchase for any naval history enthusiast.