First of all, thanks to all of you who gave us feedback over the last couple of years. This wouldn’t have been possible without people outside of out club keeping us honest.
The final page count is 328 pages of illustrations, drills, charts, diagrams, and commentary. We put everything we learned about Meyer’s longsword over the past decade into this book (plus plans for making a pell/cutting stand because that’s important). According to MS Word we spent over 500 hours on editing alone (though I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration), and countless sessions testing our interpretations.
And it can be yours for the low price of $29.53… ah screw that. You can still download it for free from the club’s website. But if you don’t want to bring a tablet to class or burn through half of ream of paper, you can get a printed copy from Lulu. (We do ‘make’ 5 dollars on every sale, but that goes directly towards working on our next book.)
So what’s next? Meyer Longsword vol 2 covering Meyer’s Zettel?
I wish. First thing we’re going to do is go through the entire book again with a new batch of students. That’s right, we’re going to retest everything. Just like our Meyer Rapier book, there’s probably going to be a 2nd edition in a couple of years as we continue to unravel Meyer’s secrets. And by then we’ll have enough trained fencers to seriously start looking at Meyer’s Zettel.
In other news, we’ve also completed our Andre Paurenfeyndt Staff Drill Book. This was a much smaller endeavor with only 16 devices. But since the weapon is double-ended, we had to expand our diagram notation and invent terminology for describing where on the staff the hands are.
We’ve already been through this material twice now, so we’re changing our focus to Meyer’s Half-staff, probably so-called because it’s about half the length of a short pike.
We’re also working on Meyer’s Rapier & Dagger/Cloak/Partisan. All of the preliminary interpretations are done (see “Meyer Rapier Drill Book 3” in the downloads folder), but now we need to test them. So expect periodic updates as we go through the material.
The last bit of news is that we just held a Talhoffer Messer Workshop. We have typed up all of the Messer and Messer & Buckler plays. Don’t expect any novel insights, but it could be useful intro before diving into the massive Lecküchner book. I don’t think it’s large enough to publish, but that means we can include the translations in the handouts.