About the cover illustration

The illustration on the cover of Angular Development with TypeScript, Second Edition is taken from the 1805 edition of Sylvain Maréchal’s four-volume compendium of regional dress customs. This book was first published in Paris in 1788, one year before the French Revolution. Each illustration is colored by hand. This figure, captioned “Le Tuteur” or “The Tutor,” is just one of many figures in Maréchal’s collection. Their diversity 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. The collection brings to life a sense of the isolation and distance of that period and of every other historic period—except our own hyperkinetic present.

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 we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.

We at Manning celebrate the inventiveness, the initiative, and the fun of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life two centuries ago, brought back to life by Maréchal’s pictures.