This book is legendary within the Osprey offices. Whenever we are working on a design for a new series cover, it is used as the worst case scenario example in all of our early designs. I know that Joe and I have spent a surprising amount of time trying to work out how to display this book in our stocklist. When we were working on the new website, we even had the developers create a dummy page to show us what this book would look like, to make sure that the insanely long subtitle wouldn't send our carefully crafted web pages into meltdown.
The stats are staggering. The subtitle is 24 words long. And the main title isn't even that short. 24 words. Over 150 letters. It feels more like a chapter than a subtitle.
What is this mysterious book with the gargantuan title? It is none other than Men-at-Arms 115: Flags of the Napoleonic Wars (3) Colours, Standards and Guidons of Anhalts, Kleve-Berg, Brunswick, Denmark, Finland, Hanover, Hesse, The Netherlands, Mecklenburg, Nassau, Portugal, Reuss, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Westphalia.
Phew...just typing it all out is pretty exhausting. Look at it...sitting there in all of it's not unspectacular glory. The cover is shown below. It actually doesn't look that out of place on the cover. Or on our new website. And if you are a tech whiz you will probably say that it is a pretty good title in terms of search engine optimization. Having said that, I did have a pop at coming up with an alternative subtitle. And struggled.
The closest I could get to a title was:
Flags of the Napoleonic Wars (3) Best of the Rest or Flags of the Napoleonic Wars (3) What we didn't cover in book 1 and 2.
Neither of which are terribly inspiring are they?
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