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Published by Didactic Press, Gardiner’s The Thirty Years War is another cheap ebook of a public-domain work. The normal price seems to be a buck or two, and I think I picked it up for free. In general, this is one of the better put together cheap OCR-derived ebooks I’ve seen. Editing problems are minimal, with only a tendency towards two words being run together as a recurring flaw. The book is marketed as ‘illustrated’, and it is, with a number period paintings, that do help some with getting the right feel, however, with few captions, and battle scenes when there is no fighting going on, and so forth, it’s hard to tell what the point of some of them is. A few portraits are included, which is nice, and I wish there were more of those.

Samuel Rawson Gardiner was a 19th-century historian known for his work on the English Civil War. This shows through from time to time here with a number of parallels and contrasts given between that and the Thirty Years War. In all, it still makes a good and readable overview of the subject today. I haven’t read much on the Thirty Years War (yet), but can recommend it as a light, short work (estimated at 200 pages) available for cheap.