A Brief History of Animals on O'Reilly Books

I think none of the users of Habrahabr need to submit O'Reilly's publishing house and his books, which attract the eye with graphic images of very different and, as a rule, very strange looking animals on their covers. Edie Friedman, creative director of O'Reilly Media, published a small post on animals.oreilly.com , in which she described how these animals got on the covers of books by the publisher.

How the lions, tigers and tarsiers made their dive

In the mid-1980s, O'Reilly (also known as O'Reilly & Associates) was selling postal catalogs of short books on various topics related to Unix. The pages of these books, known as the “Nutshell Handbooks”, were stapled together, and the books themselves had simple brown covers.

Over time, Tim O'Reilly decided to sell books in regular bookstores and hired a graphic designer to design new covers. These covers were used in the first two books sold in bookstores, but Tim was unhappy with this design.

My neighbor, who worked at O'Reilly as a technical writer and marketer, showed me the covers drawn by the publisher and wondered if I had a better idea. At that time, I was immersed in the world of DEC's VAX / VMS as executive producer of slides and video presentations; I heard about Unix, but with great difficulty I imagined what it was - I never saw a Unix programmer and never tried to edit text in vi. Even the terms associated with Unix - vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses seemed strange, they sounded like words from the world of Dragons and Dungeons, a popular game among geeks (mostly male).


Sometimes, when thinking through the design, the idea comes without any effort - everything immediately falls into place, as if it always has been. When I began to look for suitable images on the cover of books, I came across nineteenth-century engravings that showed some strange looking animals that seemed very appropriate for these strange-sounding Unix terms; besides, it seemed to me that they look exotic enough to attract the attention of programmers. As I studied the characteristics of these real animals, I quickly discovered an intriguing similarity between animals and technology, and this feeling grew as I learned more and more about animals and technology. I was so excited and inspired by this feeling that all the weekend I worked on covers without interruptions for sleep and rest, and then gave a few sketches to my neighbor to show them in the office.
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Some people in O'Reilly were amazed: it seemed to them that these animals look too strange, ugly and eerie, but Tim immediately realized what he wanted - he liked these bizarre images that had to distinguish their books on the shelves from other publishers' suggestions. and his feelings did not let him down: since then we have published hundreds of books with animals and this brand is now known everywhere.

What we realized after years

Chimps have no tails.

Once I read the signature of the engraving incorrectly and mistakenly named some chimpanzee monkey. We received a whole bunch of letters informing us that chimpanzees are completely devoid of tail (this is the essence of our readers).

People are ready to go around a mile to get around the animals that they feel unpleasant.

One of our readers complained that we used the image of a spider on the cover and in the text of one of our books - Webmaster in a Nutshell . Spiders terribly frightened his wife, so he had to walk through the entire book and stick the images of the spider at the beginning of each chapter so that it would not be so scary to read the book. Our other client sent us an angry email saying that there is a page on our site that he will never go to because there is a snake. It turned out that this was the “How to buy a book” page, so we had to replace the snake with a prettier rabbit.

People like animals with faces.

The pictures we used in the design of books were images from the entire animal kingdom, from large mammals like tigers or elephants to fish, birds, insects and invertebrates. We found that our customers liked animals the most, which 1) had a pronounced face and 2) looked directly at the reader.

Animals in trouble.

While studying animals for the covers of books, O'Reilly, designer Karen Montgomery and I became very sensitive to the plight of wild animals around the world. Many of the animals appearing on our covers are in critical condition - for example, tarsiers from Learning the vi & Vim Editors , Lori from sed & awk , bissa (sea turtle) from Getting Started with CouchDB , tiger from Running Mac OS X Tiger and many others. Most of the engravings were made in the 19th century, the wild world was in perfect order then; now, habitat destruction, hunting, poaching and other conflicts with humans, illegal trade and much more have done their job and the species that flourished a hundred years ago are now on the verge of extinction.

We hope that the coverage on O'Reilly Animals website of animal conservation and protection projects, large and small, from primitive to the most high-tech, will not only help to raise interest in what is already being done, we may be able to inspire smart, tech-savvy people ( such as you) on the search for new ways to preserve and protect the wild animals of the world. It seems to us that this is a very worthy occupation.