Pascal User Manual and Report by Kathleen Jensen & Niklaus Wirth

Following Sander de Jong’s post on Niklaus Wirth I came across these covers for the Pascal User Manual and Report. Of the many programming languages that Niklaus Wirth designed and contributed to, Pascal is perhaps the best known, particularly among undergraduate programming courses of the 1970s and 1980s. This showing of the second edition has a cartouche proclaiming “Special Printing for Apple Computer, Inc.”, which hints at the fact that Pascal was the preferred systems programming language for Mac apps prior to Mac OS X (the period that Wikipedia calls the “Macintosh Era”).

I didn’t realise at the time, but the silver cover is a common design element for Springer–Verlag’s computer science series (see my earlier post on Programming in Prolog). Here, the silver is paired with red for the large keyword “pascal” in Amelia for the second and third edition, and Stop for the fourth edition. Both of which happen to be favourites of mine. The first edition is part of Springer–Verlag’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series and has a much plainer covers, and no good scans available online.

I’m not sure what the solid red stripes above the “pascal” in the second edition are trying to do. The top right has a clipped corner, probably a reference to the clipped corner of an IBM 80-column punched card that dominated the industry at the time Pascal was introduced.

Remaining text is in Helvetica.

Niklaus Wirth died this year, 2024, on January 1.