About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Enterprise OSGi in Action is captioned a “Man from Slovania.” This illustration is taken from a recent reprint of Balthasar Hacquet’s Images and Descriptions of Southwestern and Eastern Wenda, Illyrians, and Slavs, published by the Ethnographic Museum in Split, Croatia, in 2008. Hacquet (1739–1815) was an Austrian physician and scientist who spent many years studying the botany, geology, and ethnography of many parts of the Austrian Empire, as well as the Veneto, the Julian Alps, and the western Balkans, inhabited in the past by peoples of many different tribes and nationalities. Hand-drawn illustrations accompany the many scientific papers and books that Hacquet published.

Slavonia is a historical region in eastern Croatia. Part of the Roman Empire until the fifth century, then part of Pannonian Croatia, subsequently ruled by Hungary, the Ottomans, and the Hapsburgs, Slavonia was briefly an independent entity until it became a part of Yugoslavia after World War II. Today Slavonia encompasses five counties in inland Croatia with a population of almost one million inhabitants.

The rich diversity of the drawings in Hacquet’s publications speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of Alpine and Balkan regions just 200 years ago. This was a time when the dress codes of two villages separated by a few miles identified people uniquely as belonging to one or the other, and when members of an ethnic tribe, social class, or trade 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 and the residents of the picturesque towns and villages in the Balkans are not readily distinguishable from people who live in other parts of the world.

We at Manning celebrate the inventiveness, the initiative, and the fun of the computer business with book covers based on costumes from two centuries ago brought back to life by illustrations such as this one.