Sunday 1 August 2010

Charles Grant on Battles - Large and Small

When idly flicking through the labels on the right hand side of this blog, I was a little shocked to see how few posts there were related to Charles Grant. As a step towards remedying this, here is a short piece he wrote for the Wargamer's Annual 1965, Don Featherstone's follow-up to his Wargamer's Yearbook 1964. As this won't be widely available elsewhere I thought it would be good to post it here.

Incidentally, it has reminded me of my long standing quandary over DF's use of the Wargamer's apostrophe (as in the Wargamer's Newsletter or Wargamer's Annual). Had it been Wargamers' this would suggest it was intended for or belonged to more than one wargamer; as it is it suggests a single wargamer. Is this the Don himself, sharing his thoughts with others where he is the eponymous wargamer? If so surely this is the spiritual ancestor of every wargames blog. Or is it intended to be the newsletter of every wargamer - "the wargamer"? I just don't know, and short of asking him (and I really don't want to bother him with this) I don't think I ever really will - but interesting to speculate...



3 comments:

MSFoy said...

The worthy apostrophe - I've always instinctively thought that the singular form was more natural, though I'm sure both are correct.

This may be because I once had many books with titles along the lines of "The Boy's Own Book of Things to Do on Rainy Days" which, evidently, are intended to be the property of a solitary boy who has no-one to play with on such a day.

Also, I think Wargamers' Newsletter would appear to presume that somehow this is the definitive one for everyone.

Charles Grant very welcome - thanks

Tony

Nick Elsden said...

Many thanks for posting the Charles Grant article. It (and any others you might be able to find in ancient publications ?), is most appreciated. Are we seeing the genesis of the younger Charles' Table Top Teasers here ?

The Grand Duke said...

Very many thanks for posting this. I remember the games and the discussion but I did not have a copy of the article. It is now in my files.
Yours aye, Charles