Brassey's The Naval Annual 1894

I have written on this subject before, but I highly recommend Brassey's Naval Annual as interesting and informative reading. I bought the 1894 volume because it has ship information relevant to the Sino-Japanese War. In the spirit of the times, there was little official secrecy. That came with the start of the Anglo-German naval race. There must have been secrets before that, but in the 1880's and 1890's there was an openness about technical information that we have not seen since. I consider myself fortunate to have an original copy of this Brassey's issue, albeit one that has been repaired. The advantage over the less costly paperback reprints is that the text and artwork are the original size and are more readable and higher quality. Still, the reprints from Elibron Classics are great. Because of them, I have a copy of the original issue from 1885. I would like to own a copy of all that they have, especially the 1897 edition, as it should have the ships for the Spanish-American War. The 1913 edition has been reprinted in the past as a hardback. For similar reasons, it is good, as it has WWI-related information. The original 1919, 1920, and 1921 volumes are also good sources of information about the aborted naval building race that was terminated by the Washington Naval Treaty. The Purdue University Library had them, when I was there quite a long time ago. In particulary, the major caliber gun data is useful for those of us who want to design our own ships.

A feature of Brassey's are the drawings and illustrations. In the 1894 edition, there are no photographs, only paintings or whatever they are that are reproduced. There are also plan and profile drawings of many ships. They vary from crude, diagrammatic pictures to detailed drawings obiously done from the plans. For example, there is an excellent set of drawings of the Japanese fast cruiser Yoshino. There are also decent drawings showing the planned configuration of the Maine, then classified as an armored cruiser. Those sorts of drawings are superior to the sort of thing published in Jane's prior WWI.