About the Cover Illustration

On the cover of iText in Action, Second Edition is “A woman from Kastela,” a small town near Split in Dalmatia, Croatia. The illustration is taken from a reproduction of an album of Croatian traditional costumes from 1879 by Nikola Arsenovic, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum in Split, itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of the town: the ruins of Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace from around AD 304. The book includes finely colored illustrations of figures from different regions of Croatia, accompanied by descriptions of the costumes and of everyday life.

Kastela is a series of seven settlements located northwest of Split that developed around seven castles overlooking a large bay. The settlements are now treated as a single town with a population of 40,000. Once an ancient Greek port, a stopover point for Roman patricians and Venetian royals and a summer place for Croatian kings, Kastela today is a tourist resort, with long sandy beaches and terraces overlooking the Adriatic Sea, surrounded by pine, tamaris, and olive trees.

Dress codes and lifestyles have changed over the last 200 years, and the diversity by region, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone of different hamlets or towns separated by only a few miles. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.

Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by illustrations from old books and collections like this one.