About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Dart in Action is captioned an “Island Woman from Zadar, Dalmatia.” The illustration is taken from the reproduction published in 2006 of a 19th-century collection of costumes and ethnographic descriptions entitled Dalmatia by Professor Frane Carrara (1812 - 1854), an archaelogist and historian and the first director of the Musuem of Antiquity in Split, Croatia. The illustrations were obtained from a helpful librarian at the Ethnographic Museum (formerly the Museum of Antiquity), itself situated in the Roman core of the medieval center of Split: 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.

Zadar is an historic town located on the Adriatic coast of Croatia; its orgins date to the Stone Age. Zadar faces the islands of Uglian and Pasman, from which it is separated by the narrow Zadar Strait. The promontory on which the old city stands used to be separated from the mainland by a deep moat which has since become landfilled. The region is rich in influences of the many nation states that ruled it through the centuries, from the Greeks and Romans to the Venetians and Austrians. Today, the city is part of the Republic of Croatia.

Dress codes have changed since the 19th century 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 different towns or regions. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life—certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.

At a time when it is hard to tell one computer book from another, 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 Carrara’s pictures.