About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Flexible Rails is called “Jeune Bourbonnaise” or a young woman from Bourbonnais, a historical region and former province of central France in the Massif Central. The illustration is taken from a French travel book, Encyclopedie des Voyages by J. G. St. Saveur, published in 1796. Travel for pleasure was a relatively new phenomenon at the time and travel guides such as this one were popular, introducing both the tourist as well as the armchair traveler to the inhabitants of other regions of the world, as well as to the uniforms and costumes of French soldiers, civil servants, tradesmen, merchants, and peasants.

The diversity of the drawings in the Encyclopedie des Voyages speaks vividly of the uniqueness and individuality of the world’s towns and provinces 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 travel guide brings to life a sense of 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, trying to view it optimistically, we have traded a cultural and visual diversity for a more varied personal life. Or a more varied and interesting intellectual and technical life.