About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Grails in Action is a “Jeune Fille de Plouneour-Trez,” or a young woman from a town in the province of Bretagne in northern France. The illustration is taken from a French book of dress customs, Encyclopedie des Voyages by J. G. St. Saveur, published in 1796. Travel for pleasure was a relatively new phenomenon at the time and illustrated guides such as this one were popular, introducing both the tourist as well as the armchair traveler to the inhabitants of other countries of the world, as well as to the regional costumes of France.

The diversity of the drawings in the Encyclopedie des Voyages speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and regions just 200 years ago. This was a time when the dress codes of two regions separated by a few dozen miles identified people uniquely as belonging to one or the other, and when members of a social class or trade or profession could be easily distinguished by what they were wearing.

Dress codes have changed since then and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now often hard to tell the inhabitant of one continent from another. Perhaps, trying to view it optimistically, we have traded a world of cultural and visual diversity for a more varied personal life...or a more varied and interesting intellectual and technical life.

At a time when it is hard to tell one computer book from another, Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative—and the fun—of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by the pictures from this collection.