Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny

Man and the Computer has its title set in Moore Computer, modified to knock out the distinctive freestanding dots in M and N. “John G. Kemeny”, author, is set in Helvetica.

The man and computer of the title are represented in the cover design by, respectively, a silhouette and a reversed out punched card.

Kemeny was notable for, among other things, being President of Dartmouth College (1970 to 1981), and co-developing the computer programming language BASIC. BASIC was invented in 1963 and became incredibly influential and popular on the minicomputers and microcomputers of the 1970s and 1980s (see, for example, the first million-selling computer book: BASIC Computer Games). At the time of this book’s publication, 1972, punched card would have been the principal method of submitting computer code for running.

The book is apparently a personal retrospective of computer up to that point.

The holes (white rectangles in this showing) punched in the card encode letters and numbers in EBCDIC; which when seen visually in a punched card could be considered a sort of alternate script. Each column encodes a single character (numbers have one punch, letters two). A card would normally have 80 columns, but here only columns 5 thru 28 are shown (and only partially at that). I had a go at decoding the punched card, and while it is only partly possible, the word “ABLE” is encoded in columns 18 thru 21.