The illustration on the cover of Introducing Data Science 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. The caption for this illustration reads “Homme Salamanque,” which means man from Salamanca, a province in western Spain, on the border with Portugal. The region is known for its wild beauty, lush forests, ancient oak trees,
rugged mountains, and historic old towns and villages.
The Homme Salamanque is just one of many figures in Maréchal’s colorful 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.
