Part of being students of history is reading heavily in the subject, whether within our own professional specializations or elsewhere. Such intense engagement with published texts, from academic monographs to more public-facing volumes, has led to us developing certain stylistic preferences and annoyances with everything from writing to formatting to citations. Many of these are due to the decisions of publishers, and some may even have good reasons behind them. Our staff just can’t resist giving our own opinions on what we’ve observed and have developed into personal pet peeves.
As much as text is the literal foundation of studying history, the discipline just wouldn’t be the same without visual imagery alongside all that reading. Whether as the basis of their own analysis and argument, necessary context for an era, illustration of geopolitical development, or just an aid for immersing readers in a certain subject, maps, pictures, and other images of all kinds litter the pages of published works. When used well, they enhance the experience of even the most knowledgeable Ivory Tower academic. All too often in my own experience, however, images are chosen, organized, or used so poorly that they have a negligible effect on the reading experience, if not even a slightly negative one! Unlike my first post in this series about authors’ manipulation of statistics and data, the following frustrations can be almost exclusively chalked up to publishers’ wishes to sensibly economize. The outcome, though, can be supremely frustrating. I’m under no illusions this is anything other than my shouting into the wind, but a man can dream—and maybe give voice to others’ silent anger while doing so, too.
Photo Dumping
Have you ever been reading a history book and thought to yourself how helpful it would be to have pictures of what’s being described…only to find those images hundreds of pages later, stacked together in the exact middle of the book? Same here. This particular problem seems to be the case with just about every book nowadays. Sometimes they’re all in one bank of plates, other times they’re split into two or even three sections. Whatever the case, readers are deprived of supplementary images while reading relevant material and must either remember what was covered hundred of pages ago or keep an image in mind for a topic hundreds of pages hence, all while interrupting the flow of the chapter they are actually currently reading. Set images within the text where they should be!
The Endless Atlas
A cousin of the midway photo dump is the initial barrage of map after map after map showing the evolution of a work’s subject area across centuries, sometimes even millennia. This is most common with Big History books that cover multiple eras, but I’ve seen it happen with war or even battle histories, as well. It’s not the maps themselves that I have a problem with; personally, I think geography, and especially political geography, is criminally under taught these days, and I often begin AP history coaching sessions with map quizzes for my students. A single establishing map, in the style of a fantasy novel, is even laudable to orient readers less familiar with a region. Frontloading all of a narrative’s maps , however, is less than useless. At best, informed readers will page through familiar images divorced from the author’s argument; at worst, uninformed audiences will see only so much cartographic noise before they’ve received any of the information required to make sense of it all.
Who Needs to See?
Sometimes, most commonly in paperback works, you find that miracle of miracles in modern publishing: pictures set in the text where they are most directly relevant and referenced—but of course we can’t just enjoy it. All too often, these images are black-and-white reproductions of colored originals, and since paperbacks are supposed to be cheaper, it should come as no surprise that many publishers don’t really invest all they should into making sure reproduced images actually look good. There’s nothing like having an author analyze an artifact in detail as you look at a box filled with what appear to be imperceptible shades of black to kill your enthusiasm. It’s basically the scholarly equivalent to watching a modern episode of television that takes place at night. If I can’t see what’s being portrayed, what is the point of even having it there in the first place?
Relevance Shmelevance
My usual refrain is to add more: more context, more evidence, more detailed information in general. Not so with images, however. So many volumes of history use a shotgun approach to visual aids, including not only portraits of individuals involved but sometimes just general establishing shots or paintings of key locations, even when these paintings aren’t referenced at all in the main text. When combined with the approach of lumping all plates together in a single middle insert, I would argue that the value of such an approach is so miniscule that publishers should just leave them out altogether and save themselves even more money. Bizarrely, I have also encountered the rare book that includes highly relevant pictures that could serve as reinforcing examples of certain topics of discussion…only for their captions to not explain that connection at all and leave less intellectually agile readers to wonder at their inclusion in the first place.