Interview With Authors---Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle With Maps, Detweiler and Reisch [Part Three]

Interview with David Detweiler and David Reisch, of Gettysburg: The Story Of The Battle With Maps, Editors of Stackpole Press, [2013]

DD--David Detweiler, President and Chairman, Stackpole Publishing, author

DR—David Reisch, historian, researcher, cartographer, author

CWL—Civil War Librarian, Rea Andrew Redd, Director, Eberly Library, and adjunct instructor, U.S. history, Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, PA 15370; author of Gettysburg Campaign Study Guide, Volume One, [2012].

Part Three

CWL: 11  On page 60, the text reads “Longstreet peevishly rejoins, no. Lee told us to attack up the road, we attack up the road. Longstreet is torn. There’s no one way he feels.”   What tone are you setting for the reader?

DD:  Good question.  I was trying to mimetically not only overtly describe Longstreet’s dilemma but convey the mood of what I think at that moment was his frustration, loyalty, pessimism, anger, stubbornness, loyalty (again) and fatalism, each at war with the other(s).

CWL: 12. The review in Library Journal stated: “A dispassionate recitation will suddenly veer into purple prose (e.g., “Near the darkling swale of Plum Run, Barksdale is discovered….”), complete with mixed metaphors (e.g., “Like a mighty breaker exhausting to froth, the Confederate sweep eastward has run out of steam”).”  As authors, how do you approach statements like these?

DD:  I am responsible for the outbreaks of purple prose, from more than which you will find in the book David Reisch saved me.   I don’t apologize, but I do, certainly, admit that what I write sometimes (I trust not often) goes too far, becomes contrived or, worse, cute or, worst of all, opaque in a sophomoric attempt to be colorful.   Yet, you can’t write well if you edit yourself while you’re writing, so, what I hope I can learn to do (better) is to flag and temper or eradicate the purple prose when it rears up.  But who’s counting?  I am (!)  Of perhaps four dozen written review/responses, from here and there, to the book, about half a dozen expressly make it clear they do not like the writing.  Not quite double that go out of their way to praise the writing.  And the great majority (I with unobjective egoism calculate), in praising the book highly, generally and without caveat are in effect approving of the writing.  But!  The purple prose criticism is not only valid but, much as I hate to admit it, accurate.

DR:  De gustibus non est disputandum. [In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.]

CWL: 13.  Stackpole Publishing has been around since before World War 2. Tell us a little about the history of Stackpole Books and Edward Stackpole.

DD:  We – my family – have been publishing for 120-plus years – newspaper, the odd book in the early twentieth century.  In the mid-1930s my grandfather Edward Stackpole and his brother formalized the tiny book publishing vein as “Stackpole Sons.”   He, my granddad, his father before him, a bit, my dad, and I all worked in the field (of publishing).  My grandfather Edward Stackpole, a friend, I’m fortunate to be able to say, was a general, was awarded everything, and I mean everything, short of the Medal of Honor for his service in World War I, published, wrote, was heavy into community affairs, a charming man, what they sometimes call a mensch.

CWL: 14. Stackpole Publishing offers Don Troiani’s books.  Is it an exacting business to publish art books?

DD:  Very exacting to publish art books, which we don’t strictly speaking do . . . Jack Davis suggested we see if Don Troiani (head and shoulders, in my opinion, the best Civil War painter and one of the very few best “war” painters anywhere ever), would let us do a book, with text (Jack and the late Brian Pohanka), of his magnificent paintings.  He did, we did, and the huge success continues.  We’re proud to have more than one Don Troiani book on our list.  He is the very best and, naturally, though I believe he’s pleased overall with what we’ve been able to do together, momentary issues such as the exact blue of a particular sky have, once or twice, led to what the diplomats call a frank and open exchange.   We are, again, immensely fortunate he chose us.

DR:  Exacting – and very much worth it.  Don’s paintings involve not only days upon days at the canvas, but also countless hours devoted to researching the historical details, acquiring period uniforms and equipment, and enlisting individuals to pose.  He takes the time to get every detail right, from the shade of blue of a Union jacket to the position of a metal ring on a musket, and we’re happy to take the time to make sure Don’s artistic talent and historical meticulousness come through in the printed books.  The results, we hope, speak for themselves.

CWL: 15. Stackpole Publishing offers Ralph Peter’s fiction written under the pseudonym of Owen Parry.  How did this come about?

DD:  Ralph is a friend, and a friend of the house, and, as with Don Troiani, we’re hugely proud to have books of Ralph’s on our list.  Principally, as we are, principally, a nonfiction publisher, we have done collections of Ralph’s well-known non-fiction writing, commentary, on geo-military-political affairs and history.   These books have been a source of pride for us not to mention lucrative.  We also have a few re-issues of Ralph’s best-selling Civil War novels (nom de plume Parry).  We haven’t had a book of his in a while as he’s doing more Civil War novels, one of which to me – Cain at Gettysburg – is on the short list of the best Civil War fiction.

CWL: 16 What will Stackpole Publishing release within the next two years regarding the American Civil War?

DD:  Classified I’m afraid.   Thanks so much for the forum and the good questions, it was fun.

CWL:  Thank upu  for Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle With Maps and for this interview.

Interview With Authors---Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle With Maps, Detweiler and Reisch [Part Two]

Interview with David Detweiler and David Reisch, of Gettysburg: The Story Of The Battle With Maps, Editors of Stackpole Press, [2013]

DD--David Detweiler, President and Chairman, Stackpole Publishing, author

DR—David Reisch, historian, researcher, cartographer, author

CWL—Civil War Librarian, Rea Andrew Redd, Director, Eberly Library, and adjunct instructor, U.S. history, Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, PA 15370; author of Gettysburg Campaign Study Guide, Volume One, [2012].

CWL: 6. Can you describe the process of preparing the atlas for publication?  What stumbling blocks were there? 

DD:  Stumbling blocks:   in a word, the ever difficult, torturous, essential decision, demanding to be made again and again and again, of what to leave out.  Also, to strive (didn’t often succeed, but tried) to make all clear.  Text.  Maps.  People are starving for clear expression.

DR:  It was an intense and intensive process of writing, mapmaking, discussing, revising, with research done, and done again, every step of the way.  It involved not only the two of us and stacks of books, reams of paper, but also a team of creative, hardworking folks who took the text and hand-drawn pencil maps and turned them into the eye-pleasing pages you see in the book.

CWL: 7. What did you discover that surprised and when you knew you were done?

DD:  That I wasn’t sad.

CWL: 8. On the left page "clips" of the map on the right page are presented.   This appears to be a novel approach.  How did this concept develop?

DD:  Good question.  Though we held the concept of never changing the “stage” of the base map, it does, in fact, illuminate and edify to blow up a sector, to show complicated action there, so we developed what we call “margin” art, or little clips, as you excellently describe it, to enlarge, even mark up a bit, and run in the margin of the base-map-facing text page, beside the relevant text.    Also, in the margin art you can graphically, i.e. nonverbally, “say” (show) what might have been, what was intended, what was prevented, so on.

CWL: 9.   Time on the battle clock is always debatable.  Noah Trudeau’s  A Testing Of Courage has clocks with hour and minute hands on each map. Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle With Maps uses terms such as ‘midday’ ,  ‘late afternoon’ and ‘twilight’ to designate time. 

DD:  Right . . . we worked hard to get the events described/portrayed in the order in which they happened.  To get (approximate) contiguity and contemporaneousness . . . but as to what 15-minute time field anything happened in, it’s far rarer to find agreement than diverse variation, among the many excellent texts and map books on the battle, as to just when an event occurred.  What its duration was.   I found three reputable accounts of the Battle that couldn’t agree on when the sun came up!

DR:  Almost unbelievably to our modern atomic-clocked minds, time was a rather subjective thing 150 years ago, outside but especially inside the world of battle.  Time was often guessed at by the position of the sun, those who had watches generally did not synchronize them, and combat distorted – stretched, compressed, twisted – time.  One example:  Most accounts agree that the artillery barrage before Pickett’s Charge began around 1 p.m. on July 3, but estimates of the barrage’s duration vary wildly, from approximately twenty minutes to five hours or more . . . which of course has implications for just when the Charge itself began.  But there are enough firsthand accounts, and enough historians have analyzed and dissected those accounts, that very reasonable estimates could be made, especially within the geographic and chronologic framework we were creating – once we nailed down a couple events, another handful would fall into place.

CWL: 10. The narrative is written in the present tense and future tense. How was this decision made?

DD:  There’s a tiny sprinkling of past tense.  But you’re right, 99% is present tense.   Guess I thought the past tense might become too ponderous . . . also, the book as I’ve struggled to describe (facets of) it above is, in its spirit, and letter, virtually always in the present moment.    Other (better) books must (nevertheless) flash back, use the pluperfect, and in their structure as well as tense stutter around, back, forward, in their sections, in time.

DR:  The present tense was a natural fit for a book like this, which describes and illustrates the battle as it unfolded – er, unfolds.  Hopefully it conveys a sense of immediacy and contingency – a sense that the battle is happening right here, right now, and could, at any number of decision points, have turned out somewhat differently.  The present tense isn’t appropriate for every work of history, and it has its limitations, but to my mind it’s not deployed as often as it might be, particularly in military history.  Castel’s Decision in the West is an outstanding example of the possibilities for the present tense in historical writing.

Interview With Authors---Gettysburg: The Story of the Battle With Maps, Detweiler and Reisch [Part One]

Interview with David Detweiler and David Reisch, of Gettysburg: The Story Of The Battle With Maps, Editors of Stackpole Press, [2013]

DD--David Detweiler, President and Chairman, Stackpole Publishing, author

DR—David Reisch, historian, researcher, cartographer, author

CWL—Civil War Librarian, Rea Andrew Redd, Director, Eberly Library, and adjunct instructor, U.S. history, Waynesburg University, Waynesburg, PA 15370; author of Gettysburg Campaign Study Guide, Volume One, [2012]. 

CWL: 1. Tell us a bit about yourself regarding and how you came to be editors for Stackpole Press?

DD:  STACKPOLE is a family-owned small business and I the fourth generation.  We do excellent books, I think.  Have been running it for 38 years;  if survival’s success, am succeeding.

DR:  It was my good fortune that Stackpole was hiring just as I left college with a degree in history and a love for the written word.  I’m still here more than ten years later.

CWL: 2. As editors, what tasks to you regularly do?

DD:  I am an editor at heart, despite title, and an editor finds superb authors and helps them develop a book better even than they could have imagined.

DR:  Editors, especially at a smaller publisher like Stackpole, perform a variety of tasks, from the acquisition and development of new books to the copyediting and proofreading of those books, as well as marketing and promotion work.  Turns out we can also be called upon, happily, to be historians as well.

CWL: 3. What got you interested in the study of history and the Civil War period?  Are other periods of history as important to you as the American Civil War?

DD:  My granddad, a citizen soldier, was gripped by and wrote about the Civil War.  I picked at a ravel, a couple of years ago:  Gettysburg, and have happily drowned in the infinite fascination of the infinite subject matter.  (More on mixed metaphors later.)

DR:  My interest in history began, when I was a boy of eight or nine, with an interest in the Civil War, which in turn began with books, such as the old classic kids’ novel Rifles for Watie.  Soon I moved on to Civil War Times magazine and adult history books.  Among the first of those I ever read was General Stackpole’s They Met at Gettysburg.  I was hooked, on Gettysburg, on the Civil War, on history.  It didn’t hurt that I grew up half an hour from the battlefield, had parents who encouraged my interests, and had some wonderful and inventive history teachers, not only in college, but also in middle and high school.  I often venture into other areas of history, World War II especially, but without fail I come back to the American Civil War.  Fortunately for publishers, not to mention historians, there seems always to be something new to learn, new to say, about this inspiring, appalling war of better angels and killer angels.

CWL: 4. Within the recent past, several Gettysburg Campaign atlases have been published. Why another atlas on Gettysburg?

DD:  I conceived of a treatment of the Battle of Gettysburg which would map, every other page, the progress of the battle without changing the grid, the size, the dimensions, the area, of the map.  Books previously – excellent ones – without fail took advantage of space to, when half the battlefield contains no event, leave it visually out.  Our GETTYSBURG shows the flow of the battle by keeping the stage – the base map – constant.  Other books zoom in, focus on an important area, fine.  But our original treatment shows something that a “moving camera” cannot:  the flow, the progress, of the facets of the battle as interrelated in time and space constant, over the 3 days.  Years ago when they made a film of the ballet Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev’s I think), it drove me crazy when the movie camera moved – with Nureyev as he leaps -- or Fonteyn as she pirouettes along.  Ballet’s to been seen danced, its flow, on the unmoving base map of the stage.

CWL: 5. What makes your study stand out?  What does it contribute to the literature that has not already been contributed by others?

DR:  We’re lucky to have some very good maps of the battle.  But as useful as those other maps are, the picture they give can sometimes be disjointed or at least incomplete.  It’s essential to zoom in on, say, the Wheatfield in order to understand that bloodily tangled area of the battlefield.  But our book zooms out to show not only what was happening in the Wheatfield, but also what was happening elsewhere on the field at the same time – the fighting taking place in other sectors, the movement of reinforcements, and so on – so that the importance of the Wheatfield becomes clear (e.g., why it was the scene of such desperate fighting, what the Confederates could have done if they decisively seized it, how Union reinforcements of the Wheatfield sector weakened other parts of Meade’s line) and so that the tactical decisions of Lee, Meade, and their lieutenants can be more easily understood.  We’ve aimed to depict – shifting now from dance to music – not movements or isolated bars of melody, not cellos or trumpets alone, but the entire grand symphony that was the Battle of Gettysburg.

New On The Personal Book Shelf---Concise Historical Atlas Of The U.S. Civil War

Concise Historical Atlas Of The U.S. Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Oxford University Press, 2009, 112 pp., glossary, charts, bibliography, index, 52 color maps, $24.95.

In an attractive 7"x9" format, Sheehan-Dean and Oxford University Press' Concise Atlas offers 52 maps of the territorial growth from the Revolutionary War period to the presidential election of 1876. The work appears to be developed for courses that focus upon the Civil War and Reconstruction Era.

Most recent atlases on the market offer a large coffee table format of the original maps drawn for officers or on topographical features. Sheehan-Dean's atlas focus is readability, clarity and explanation. Three types of maps are in the atlas: campaign, battle and data. The data-analytical maps graphically represent the several core issues that emerged during the antebellum, war, and reconstruction eras.
Maps of industrialization, agriculture and politics establish the context with which the Civil War was initiated, fought and politically settled.

Each of the 52 maps is full page and set opposite a page of text that discusses the context of the map. Major themes of the war are broadly set forth. but do not make a direct reference to competing interpretations. Sheehan-Dean recognizes that these brief discussions are not definitive but merely a doorway into a larger and deeper dialog with primary sources and current scholarship.

The first seven maps present issues and data of the Antebellum Era; the last seven maps present issues and data of the Reconstruction Era. The remaining 38 maps are campaign, battle and political maps. For example there is a Dissent (1861-1865) map, and Effect of the Emancipation Proclamation map, a Confederate States congressional Elections Map (Fall 1863) and a Union congressional elections map (Fall, 1864).

Concise Historical Atlas Of The U.S. Civil War fine resource for the Advanced Placement instructor and student, undergraduate student, and Civil War readers.