About the Cover Illustration

The figure on the cover of Struts 2 in Action is a shepherd from the moors of Bordeaux, “Berger des Landes de Bordeaux.” The region of Bordeaux in southwestern France has sunny hills that are ideal for viniculture, as well as many open and marshy fields dotted with small farms and flocks of grazing sheep. Perched on his stilts, the shepherd was better able to navigate the boggy fields and tend to his charges.

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 and the armchair traveler to the inhabitants of other regions of France and abroad.

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.