A short history of the O’Reilly animals (2013) | Hacker News Reader

A short history of the O’Reilly animals (2013)

oreilly.com

166 pointsneamar51 comments

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.

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 https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreil...

Agreed. The submitted link is to a list of book covers. Dang, can we change the link to this one? This page actually matches the title.

Changed from https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp. Thanks!

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 -

> 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.

That is great -- I had to cover the snake on "High Performance Python" when I would read it out loud for my 5 y.o. as he fell asleep.

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: https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-search=Ember&x-sort=an...

I’d noticed this owing to Hadley Wickham’s R books - all fittingly feature birds native to New Zealand.

I'm imagining a sitcom scene where authors get into a fight over who got the best animal.

.... If George Costanza wrote an O'Reilly book, where he requests a specific animal for some sitcom reason, but instead his book gets something silly or embarrassing.

My editor got really mad when I tried to switch my animal so I got stuck with a beagle, my least favorite dog.

They have a "BeagleBone Cookbook" that features a... Foxhound.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/beaglebone-cookbook/978...

> 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.

Definitely preferred to the weird down blouse portraits on the covers of the "Head First" books...

I never thought of it as sexual, but I was much younger when I bought my "Head First into AJAX" book [0]

What I like about the "Head First" style was that it reminded me of the photography you'd find in a lot of the 90s Klutz books. I had the Cootie-Catcher's one [1] and the speech bubbles and extreme angle photography was prevalent and reminded me of the Head First books.

[0] https://openlibrary.org/books/OL10781023M/Head_First_Ajax

[1] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL8708878W/The_Cootie_Catcher_...

Relevant: https://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2005/08/12/the_head_first_girl...

I've noticed this stock photo on various flyers over the years too

I just checked, and the O RLY Cover Generator is still active if you want to make your own:

https://dev.to/rly

Past related (singleton) threads:

A short history of the O’Reilly animals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481353 - June 2020 (1 comment)

A short history of the O'Reilly animals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22293920 - Feb 2020 (1 comment)

A Short History of the O’Reilly Animals (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16370682 - Feb 2018 (1 comment)

A Short History of the O'Reilly Animals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701177 - July 2017 (1 comment)

Recently came across this tweet https://mobile.twitter.com/teej_m/status/1489491830580264960 and I'm curious if these illustrations are public domain because of how old they are.

It seems most of them are engravings from the 19th century, so most definitely in the public domain.

In fact I'm a bit sad that they switched from these engravings to color drawings of animals recently...

The tarsier appears on the cover of some versions of a DJ Shadow album…

https://www.discogs.com/release/324160-DJ-Shadow-The-Private...

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?

I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.

They used to be my go to. I have Unix Power Tools/ mastering regular expressions still looking down on me.

But they really really pushed the safari subscription and stopped selling dam free e-books. Safari is probably great, but when I tried it I found it clunky and kinda a pain. Being able to search through your books is great. I had bought probably like 20 ebooks from them when they were still selling them.

I imagine that tech books don't sell in huge volumes. So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor. With online resources they're probably selling fewer books as well.

Manning is quite decent I'll agree.

> So the pay isn't great so its probably hard to get people to write them, as its more of a labor of love than a profit making endeavor.

Plus it can be a career cornerstone especially for authors who do consulting, to have written an O'Reilly book on their topic, I would imagine.

It seems they have increased their output, and you have to sieve through more carefully. In many fields the overlap between the many books from the same publisher about the same topic can be pretty annoying, and this is now the case with O'Reilly as well, apparently. Just tried to find some good books in the data science/R/scipy space, and they have massively increased their portfolio there. Also, the prices seem to be much higher (inflation?).

Something that always bugged me and still is the case is that O'Reilly publishes many books with a general title, which then turn out to be basically tutorials for one specific library/language/ecosystem (especially if the technology in question is less popular, otherwise they would use it for advertising on the cover).

They claim 1463, yet only show the first 1361! Where have you taken the missing animals, O'Reilly?!

https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp?x-o=1360

My favorite is the slightly creepy MicroPython cover:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-with-microp...

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.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp

A friend once quipped that each O’Reilly book you read was worth a 10k bump in salary.

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.

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. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/windows-xp-annoyances/0...

Something about that species makes me profoundly uncomfortable every time I see it...

You might be experiencing trypophobia[1]:

Trypophobia is an aversion to the sight of irregular patterns or clusters of small holes or bumps. It is not officially recognized as a mental disorder, but may be diagnosed as a specific phobia if excessive fear and distress occur. Most affected people mainly experience disgust but not fear when they see trypophobic imagery.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypophobia

It looks infested by something unpleasant. My pet theory is that revulsion was an evolutionary mechanism to discourage eating diseased or parasite-infested food (parallel to odors indicating organic putrification).

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.

Libraries and museums often put imge collections online.

The British Library / British Museum and Library of Congress would be good starting points.

Anything published prior to 1927 should be public domain within the US. Status elsewhere may vary.

Many libraries have digital archives. The NYPL has an extremely large searchable one here[1]. The National Archives are also a great resource for old engravings and drawings (and they have a nice API to boot).

Edit: direct link to some animal engraving results: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/search/index?utf8=%E2%9C...

[1]: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/

> Understanding Linux Network Internals

> Cowboy Domino Players

Ah, yes, playing in their natural habitat.

Fun find: you can type "human" into search and see all the covers with people

When you saw an animal you knew that it was a good book. I don't know if I had su much trust in any other publisher.

> thought it would help to make the books stand out from other publishers’ offerings

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.

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.

Maybe less so now, but the early ones were most certainly distinctive. Especially the Camel book! (Programming Perl)

The Camel became a Perl symbol, much like Peter Norton's pink shirt became the symbol of DOS machine language calls.

Also, Larry Wall chanelling a wizardy school headmaster in his introduction in the Camel book ages before a certain British Author ever thought about writing...

Good times.

Talking about camels, I haven't found 'Real World OCaml' on their website.

https://dev.realworldocaml.org/index.html

> But they don't stand out from each other.

They were (still?) also colour-coded[0].

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/AC...

The light cream golden retriever has not been taken yet. Quick to closest word editor !

Ephraim Kishon wrote a satire like that about his editor asking him to write a children's book featuring some animal, because that's the only way to still make money writing books.

There is some brainstorming on which animal to use, but it invariably turns out that the animal in question had already been taken, always featuring in some repetitive plot along the lines of "animal child runs away from home (possibly by travelling on a jeep), experiences various adventures and eventually returns back home". Eventually they hit upon the idea of writing something about a deep-sea sponge, which turns out to have not been taken by anybody else so far.

The first volume of the new series of books is "David The Deep-Sea Sponge Goes To Town" [1], where David breaks free from his parental home in order to pursue a career as a bath sponge in Jerusalem. In the volume after that, he'll return home again – most likely on a jeep.

[1] Freely translating from the German version here, where most animals have alliterative names. No idea if that story ever had an official English translation and what the sponge might have been called there.

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