The Art of Swordsmanship by Hans Lecküchner (Armour and Weapons) Hardcover – Illustrated, July 16, 2015

Good book, but you have to understand that it is a translation of the original text, complete with the quirks in digesting it that that entails. Make use of the glossary, inspect the text and images closely. Reading it alongside video interpretations you can find on YouTube works pretty well.

It's a decent book as long as you just want to know about Leckuchner's sytem. Otherwise it's not a good book, and not worth the price.Though it's really informational, its design is really bad. Images are small and only in Black & White with very little contrast; spaces between pages are largely wasted; types are squeezed together in big paragraphs...It's a painful process to just read the book.Also, this book is only a translation of Leckucher's original manuscript, as it doesn't come with some modern interpretations of each techniques which made it hard to understand.It's worth notice that a lot of terminologies are used in this book. Though they appear quite frequently in the modern HEMA systems regarding German school of fencing, it would still be very hard to read and understand this book if the reader doesn't familiar with German school of fencing or HEMA.

Things are very poorly explained in the various techniques, and the wording is so bad that you may need to read it multiple times AND already have a fair bit of knowledge on messer use to get anything out of it. Also the illustrations are mostly useless, as they usually depict a random step in a complex technique, instead of showing you step by step what to do.I wouldn’t recommend this book.

Good messer read

EXCELLENT

This is the best translation yet for Lekuchner's messer. It's a primary source, so do not expect anything but a faithful translation of the 15th century text. The author offers no interpretation, and that's a very good thing - this is a primary source on the langes messer made available to an English speaking audience and it's offered without apology or compromise. Forgeng has done an excellent job here.

I am disappointed by the book for the following reasons:- The text does not contain a transcription of the original text, even the reproduced pages of Cgm 582 are cropped in such a way that all the text is gone and merely the figures remain.- The size of the figures is rather small and they are only reproduced in black and white.- The author translated everything, even the technical terms, and even worse, he opted sometimes for rather unusual translations. An example: "Entrüsthau" is translated as "Anger Cut" instead of the more common "disarming strike" (probably from the modern (i.e. 17th century onwards) meaning of "Entrüstung" - "outrage").- Although the book comprises a short introduction and a glossary section, it lacks a real discussion of the text and the translation (explanations why the text was translated this way, what other possible translations/interpretations are possible, etc.). The reader has no other choice than to believe blindly that the interpretation of the author as expressed in his translation is the correct one - no review/understanding of the translation process is possible. The occasional footnotes in the text only compare Cgm 582 ("Munich") with Cod. Pal. germ. 430 ("Heidelberg").In a nutshell, I would not buy the book again, because I don't trust the translation and I think that it does not contain anything that is not available in better quality and for free on the internet: Wiktenauer and several HEMA clubs have published free translations of the works of Leckküchner and high-resolution scans of the original documents are available here: Cgm 582: [...]: [...]

and he was chuffed to bits with it!apparently Hans Lecküchner was one of the most knowledgable and skilled Historical European Martial Art's Masters of his time, and this work by him is unprecedented in it scope and detail compared to his contemporaries.If you're into studding H.E.M.A, this book comes recomeneded.

My initial disappointment at the pictures being printed in monochrome were offset by the sheer number of engravings found in this book. A greater disappointment was in the selection of the font - the backside of the book has a beautiful typeface, but inside the book it appears to be Times New Roman. That font on the back was what made me want the book in the first place.I appreciate that 20-50% on many of the pages is a blank space, as it allows for me to write in my own interpretations. Sadly, aesthetically, it is displeasing to the eye.I don't think I could recommend this to another person, as the translation is dubious at times, the full text is missing, and there is a difficulty in parsing the information and implementing the techniques as written. If you were wanting the book as a resource, I would suggest finding another translation, but as it stands, I am happy enough to keep this book in my collection at the price I paid.

The book arrived in perfect condition.The content itself is in English only with the corresponding pictures held in gray.The quality of the pictures could in my opinion be better to distinguish more details, but overall it's a good investment.

good companion to a serie of videos about Messer...