Do you like side swords, but can’t stand not having something in your left hand? Are spearmen constantly harassing you when all you’ve got is a sword? Then we’ve got the book for you.
After months of carefully testing each play (and a year of being distracted by other topics), we’re happy to announce our Meyer Rapier Drill Book 3: Dagger, Cloak, and Spear. This drill book covers every play in Meyer’s 1570 book for the sidesword and dagger, sidesword and cloak, and sidesword vs spear/partisan.
At only 52 pages, it’s one of our shortest books. But it’s also one of the most complex, so having prior experience with the sidesword (a.k.a. 16th century German rapier) is highly recommended.
As with all our dill books, the PDF version can be downloaded for free from the resources page of the website. If you don’t want to print it yourself, you can buy a spiral bound edition from Lulu.
Wait, what happened to Meyer Rapier 2?
We recently started our research into part 2 of Meyer’s rapier. With 87 plays to go through, it’s going to be a monster of book. Hopefully once we’re done wrapping up our other projects we can start dropping monthly previews.
Other projects?
Our Meyer staff research is complete! We just need to type of all the notes… and draw the diagrams… and edit the book… and make the matching posters…
There’s a lot that goes into each book, as they encapsulate everything we’ve learned about the topic over months of methodically working through the plays and pressure testing them in sparring. But we expect to have Meyer Polearms Drill Book 1: Half-Staff ready to share over the next few months. In the meantime, you can still download the preview versions.
What about Italian Rapier?
After years of work, our L’Ange Rapier Drill Book is complete and just needs to go through editing. Since it’s one of our larger projects, we are taking our time with editing. So we probably won’t publish until next month. If you want to print the April 2026 preview, it probably won’t be very different from the final draft.
Fun fact: our L’Ange picture book is the first book we published on Lulu back in 2024. It was never meant to be a commercial product; we were just testing to see how Lulu works. As such, there are only 3 copies in circulation, one owned by Jonathan and one by Jonathan’s mother.