The animal covers are great branding by O'Reilly... it subconsciously signals me that the book is of high quality due to experience with other high quality "animal cover" books. It takes away the friction of a random cover on a book that you are interested in and having to do research to figure out if the book is any good.
O'Reilly books were once a major part of my adult life. When I worked on a daily basis in Lower Manhattan, I bought nearly every O'Reilly book about UNIX tools and languages. Most often, I bought two copies: one for my desk at work and one for my home office.<p>The first purchases I made at the very beginning of Amazon.com were O'Reilly books, two copies at a time. Initially this was because the Borders Bookstore at 100 Broadway didn't have the book I needed yet, or didn't have two copies. I still have a few of the Amazon.com invoices in a storage box, somewhere in my utility room.
Shouldn't the real link be <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreilly-animals/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreil...</a>
Does anybody remember the software that wouldn't let you install until you gave it the name of an endangered animal in a given part of the world? I ran into this on Unix in 1988. It would ask, for instance, for the name of an endangered marsupial in Argentina, and you had to go look that up. I always thought the O'Reilly covers came from this, but apparently not.
From this link -<p>> People will go to great lengths to avoid seeing certain animals. The husband of one reader complained about our use of a spider on—and in—Webmaster in a Nutshell. Spiders terrified his wife. He went through the entire book and put white tape over the graphic on the first page of every chapter so she wouldn’t have to confront the spider. Another customer sent angry email telling us he’d never go to one of the pages on our website because it had a snake on it. It was our “How to Order” page. We replaced the snake with a rather pleasant-looking rabbit.
Fun fact: the author can ask for a particular animal, but it’s not guaranteed. When we were working on our Ember.ha book we–naturallly–asked if we could get a hamster on the cover. They weren’t sure they’d be able to influence the art chosen, but in the end they can as close as they could–a dormouse: <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=Ember&x-sort=animal" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=Ember&x-sort=an...</a>
> But Tim got it immediately—he liked the quirkiness of the animals, thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings—and it just felt right.<p>Definitely preferred to the weird down blouse portraits on the covers of the "Head First" books...
I just checked, and the O RLY Cover Generator is still active if you want to make your own:<p><a href="https://dev.to/rly" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/rly</a>
Past related (singleton) threads:<p><i>A short history of the O’Reilly animals</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481353" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481353</a> - June 2020 (1 comment)<p><i>A short history of the O'Reilly animals</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22293920" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22293920</a> - Feb 2020 (1 comment)<p><i>A Short History of the O’Reilly Animals (2013)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16370682" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16370682</a> - Feb 2018 (1 comment)<p><i>A Short History of the O'Reilly Animals</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701177" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701177</a> - July 2017 (1 comment)
Recently came across this tweet <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/teej_m/status/1489491830580264960" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/teej_m/status/1489491830580264960</a> and I'm curious if these illustrations are public domain because of how old they are.
I was once involved with the publication of an O'Reilly book. It was the first time I heard the verb "animaled", as in, "yeah, we just animaled the cover". And that meant they had chosen an animal for it. I was working with the authors, who had no input in the choice of the animal.
OReilly used to be the best, what happened? Over the last few years the OReilly books I bought haven't been that good. I've bought a bunch of Manning books recently which are quite good. Is everyone learning via MOOCs/Tutorials/Online docs/Youtube now?
They claim 1463, yet only show the first 1361! Where have you taken the missing animals, O'Reilly?!<p><a href="https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-o=1360" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-o=1360</a>
My favorite is the slightly creepy MicroPython cover:<p><a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-with-micropython/9781491972724/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-with-microp...</a>
Did anyone ever receive marsupial themed blank mini-notebooks as a
gift from O'Reilly? I still have a bunch of them kicking about my
study branded "Foyles Bookshop" from London. "Celebrating 25 Years of
Animal Magnetism" with picture of some lemur thing with cute eyes.
The animal search[1] even returns results for some categories of animals like "crustacean", "bird", and "feline". Nice attention to detail.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp</a>
I had to lobby pretty hard to get the honey badger for the cover of my book. I was surprised no one had taken that yet.<p>I do wonder about running out of animals given they publish so many new books a year.
The most memorable of these for me, by far, was the Surinam Toad on the cover of Windows XP Annoyances by David Karp. Every problem has another little brood of problems inside it. Brr. <a href="https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-annoyances/0596008767/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-annoyances/0...</a>
Does anyone know where to find these kinds of illustration online, to use for my own purposes? I assume they've been scanned from old books, and I'd like to see what others are available.
> Understanding Linux Network Internals<p>> Cowboy Domino Players<p>Ah, yes, playing in their natural habitat.<p>Fun find: you can type "human" into search and see all the covers with people
> thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings<p>But they don't stand out from each other. It's just a sea of wood cuttings of random animals, utterly unrelated to the content.<p>It also doesn't stand out from other publishers - other publishers use generic illustrations of national dress or something else instead. In all cases it's just some random image.