Date: February 2003
Subject: All Those Animals
From: John J. Whitney
I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books. I use them at work just about every day, and
I visit the O'Reilly Network,
too. All topnotch, extremely useful.
I just have to ask (I saw nothing about this anywhere on the sites, and I
love this detail): Who came up with the idea of the nice engravings of animals
for the covers? They're great! Is there some story behind this? And the
choice of which animal for which language/technology?
Kind regards,
John
Hi John,
We have a couple of online articles that answer your questions. Well, sort of. We can't tell you everything.
(Type "animals" into the search box in the upper right corner of our pages for more related reading.)
This is also fun: Cover Spoofs. Over the years we've collected these parodies of O'Reilly book covers designed by our readers.
The next question we usually get is, "So what's the animal on the cover of my book?"
We've just created a new index of O'Reilly animals, The Animal Menagerie, which lists our book titles and the
animals or objects associated with them. You
can also read about the animal on your book cover in the Colophon, located
at the back of the book, just after the Index, or online, linked from the book's catalog page. (Find your book's catalog page in the O'Reilly Book List.)
Regards,
Mary Hubben
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