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Thomas H. Monstery was born on April 21, 1824, in Copenhagen, Denmark. At age twelve he joined the Danish navy, and he later completed his military training at the Royal Military Institute of Gymnastics and Arms in Copenhagen. He went on to study at the Central Institute of Physical Culture in Stockholm, Sweden, from which he graduated a master of arms. As a soldier he fought under twelve flags in Europe and the Americas, took part in numerous revolutions, ascended to the rank of colonel, and participated in more than fifty duels with the sword, knife, and pistol. After immigrating to the United States, he embarked on a distinguished career as an instructor of fencing and pugilism, opening schools in Baltimore, Berkeley, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, and became recognized as one of the greatest fencing masters in America. During this time, he authored a number of articles on self-defense, republished under the title Self-Defense for Gentlemen and Ladies: A Nineteenth-Century Treatise on Boxing, Kicking, Grappling, and Fencing with the Cane and Quarterstaff (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015). Ben Miller is an American filmmaker and author. He is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, was the winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant for screenwriting, and has worked for notable personages such as Martin Scorsese and Roger Corman. For the last fourteen years, Miller has studied fencing at the Martinez Academy of Arms, one of the last places in the world still teaching an authentic living tradition of classical fencing. He has served as the Academy's chef de salle, and has authored articles for the Association of Historical Fencing, focusing on the fencing and dueling of the American colonial period. He is the author of Irish Swordsmanship: Fencing and Dueling in Eighteenth Century Ireland (New York: Hudson Society Press, 2017), a contributor to Scottish Fencing: Five 18th Century Texts on the Use of the Small-sword, Broadsword, Spadroon, Cavalry Sword, and Highland Battlefield Tactics, and the editor of Colonel Monstery's Self-Defense for Gentlemen and Ladies: A Nineteenth-Century Treatise on Boxing, Kicking, Grappling, and Fencing with the Cane and Quarterstaff (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2015). He also wrote the foreword to the republication of Donald McBane's classic martial arts treatise, The Expert Sword-Man's Companion: Or the True Art of Self-Defence (New York: Jared Kirby Rare Books, 2017). Miller's articles about fencing and martial arts history can be found on the websites martialartsnewyork.org and outofthiscentury.wordpress.com.
"""A curious work that reads (apart from occasional romantic elements) much like an authentic account by one of the early nineteenth-century travelers in Central America...It is one of the very few dime novels worth reading for their own merit."" - Everett Franklin Bleiler, Science-fiction, the Early Years"
Four Points of the Compass
The Unexpected History of Direction...
Hardback
$45
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