The Era when Technical Manuals had Terrible Amateur Cover Art

There is something sweet and pure about the period of time when a technologist would write an important tech manual, and then toss off an extremely amateur cartoon for the cover. The great books on FORTH are all over this. At the turn of the century publishers had to do all kinds of silly stuff because half of everybody identified such and such particular book with the cartoon dragon on the cover and the other half of everybody couldn’t take a book with such a half-assed cover seriously. Now, of course, the idea of “published technical manual” is itself a little strange.