Pen and Sword Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Pen and Sword Books, also written as Pen & Sword, lists more than 6,000 titles in print. Every year it adds another 500. These are British books, issued in hardback and softback, and many are also sold as ebook downloads. The subjects lean toward military history, militaria and other niche interests, with a main focus on the United Kingdom.

  The publisher belongs to the Barnsley Chronicle newspaper group, which is a surprising parent for a house with a list this long. That raises some questions. How did a local newspaper come to publish books on tanks, battleships and spies? What did it buy along the way, and from whom? And what does a catalogue of thousands of war books look like once it is sorted into series?

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• 2. Weekly Columns Become Books

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  The Barnsley Chronicle ran a weekly series of articles, and readers wanted more of them. The first books from the company were a direct answer to that public demand.

  One series, Dark Peak Aircraft Wrecks, told the story of crash sites in the Dark Peak area of the Peak District National Park. A second weekly feature covered the history of two Kitchener battalions, known as the Barnsley Pals. That feature aroused strong public interest. Both subjects became books, and over the years they were reprinted a number of times.

  The success of those two books led to a run of local history paperbacks. It also led to a series of guide books to battlefields. As more titles appeared, the group decided to launch a book publishing arm of its own. Soon afterward, a well-known military history imprint became available.

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• 3. The Leo Cooper Purchase

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  The year 1990 is when the Pen and Sword publishing house was established. The Barnsley Chronicle had bought the Leo Cooper imprint, and the new house grew out of that purchase.

  Leo Cooper lived from 1934 to 2013. He had built a reputation for publishing military history titles, and he was the husband of the novelist Jilly Cooper. Cooper later retired.

  The imprint gave the newspaper group a publishing name in military history from the start. The new house did not stay with that single subject for long.

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• 4. Widening the List

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  In 2008, Pen and Sword made two acquisitions. The first was Frontline Books, which focuses on military history based in the United States. The second was Seaforth Publishing, which is a leading imprint in maritime history.

  The list around those purchases had already grown. Pen and Sword branched out into naval and maritime history, aviation, local history and family history. It added collectables and antiques, nostalgia and true crime. It went on to cover transport and railways, science, archaeology, exploration and political memoirs.

  Within that wide catalogue, the named series show the scale best, and the battlefield guides are the place to begin.

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• 5. Guides for Walking Battlefields

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  Battleground Europe runs to over 100 illustrated guide books to battlefields. Its periods reach from 1066 through the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. They continue through the Zulu War and the Boer War, then on to World War I and World War II.

  Holt's Guidebooks take a lighter approach to the two world wars. These are overview books with maps, memorials, battleground descriptions and summaries aimed at tourists.

  The Aviation Heritage Trail series tells the stories, history and events behind famous aviation operations. The Pals series turns to people instead of places. It follows friends and comrades who joined the same battalions to serve King and Country in the Great War.

  Other series swap the walking boots for close technical detail.

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• 6. Machines in Detail

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  ShipCraft is a series of 30 books on military ships. It covers battleships, cruisers, destroyers, frigates, sloops and aircraft carriers. It also includes great passenger liners such as the Titanic and her sisters.

  TankCraft gives 28 books to tracked warfare vehicles, commonly known as tanks, from Britain, Germany and America. FlightCraft is smaller, at 18 books. It focuses on significant military aircraft from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and Russia, mostly from the early part of the Cold War.

  The Cold War 1945-1991 series has 19 books, each documenting an individual battle somewhere in the world. Warships of the Royal Navy tells the stories behind famous ships from the Napoleonic Wars to contemporary conflicts.

  The Napoleonic Library is a series of 27 books on the people, equipment and battles of that war. The Classics series covers military operations and stories from many different periods.

  The largest series of all is built from photographs.

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• 7. Photographs and Terror

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  Images of War is a major series of 243 books, filled with rare photographs from wartime archives. Its subjects range across every possible global military topic, from animals and aircraft to Winston Churchill and the Waffen SS. It includes concentration and death camps, individual battles, squadrons, battalions and divisions. The books follow the people and the equipment they flew, sailed and operated on the ground, in the air and at sea. They cover all theatres of war since World War One, and every photograph has a detailed caption and references.

  History of Terror is a series of 15 books on significant episodes of terror from the last two thousand years. Emperors of Rome: The Monsters deals with the bad Roman emperors from AD 14 to 548. Irgun covers the years 1931 to 1948 and the group's aim of an independent Jewish state in Palestine and Transjordan. Northern Ireland: The Troubles is an intimate account of paramilitary operations on the island of Ireland from 1968 to 1998, and of the effort to end them. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb follows al Qaeda insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen from 2007, along with splinter jihadist groups in West Africa and Europe.

  One more title in the list stands outside any series: Shot in the Tower: The Story of the Spies Executed in the Tower of London During the First World War.

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