Pub getting attention made my day. I wondered how everyone forgot about it and how no one ever mentioned that it actually gave birth to TeX and Web. Good job hacker news
The irony is that this rendered pretty poorly on my phone. Ignore me, though, as I like the idea.
The cover image is a Hieronymous Bosch woodcut of an English pub.
I’m not sure the author has seen the rest of Hieronymous Bosch’s oeuvre.
Edit: seems I phrased this badly, my point was that a Georgian woodcut circa 1810 is unlikely to be from Bosch (1450 – 1516).
This 2020 document says that it's a “cut-and-paste” from a Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) woodcut print. Which seems much more likely. https://www.saildart.org/simple/booklet/SAILDART_PREVIEW_202...
Larry was a worldly guy with wide-ranging interests. Were you thinking that if he knew about The Garden of Earthly Delights he wouldn't have chosen a woodcut of a pub for the PUB manual? Bosch has been thought of as a heretic [1] and that could have been part of the appeal for Larry, who pushed against orthodoxies throughout his career.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#Interpretatio...
Doesn't really seem out of the ordinary; even in high school in the 1980s the Bosch paintings were well-known.
... from album covers.