Locations of events.

Nowadays, building walls has once again become the political method of choice. But in the early modern period, the introduction of cannons made walls completely obsolete. In books like this one by Daniel Specklin, we can find out how people managed to protect their cities back then.

He is the prototypical old miser, his name synonymous with the expression itself: Ebenezer Scrooge. But what is so terribly wrong with the old man from Dickens’ Christmas Carol anyway?

A concerned author urges the European powers to be wary of the supremacy of Russia. The mind behind this work was Gustav III, King of Sweden, who pursued completely different interests: By expressing concerns about the European balance, he wanted to shake the balance of power in his country.

The Zurich scholar Johann Caspar Lavater argued in his four-volume work “Physiognomic fragments” that it is possible to reveal a person’s character by reading what’s “written all over his face”, as the saying goes. Some scholars mocked him, but he had many followers.

Do you like bibliophile books? Then you have to browse through this work! It shows how complicated printing was before offset printing made publishing books a piece of cake. Gessner’s compendium tells you everything one had to know about creating books in the age of movable type printing.