[HN Gopher] A short history of the O'Reilly animals (2013)
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A short history of the O'Reilly animals (2013)
Author : neamar
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-02-07 08:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.oreilly.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.oreilly.com)
| adolgert wrote:
| 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.
| pbowyer wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| taubek wrote:
| 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.
| sourthyme wrote:
| 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.
| pilaf wrote:
| It seems most of them are engravings from the 19th century, so
| most definitely in the public domain.
| rob74 wrote:
| In fact I'm a bit sad that they switched from these
| engravings to color drawings of animals recently...
| [deleted]
| seewhat wrote:
| The tarsier appears on the cover of some versions of a DJ
| Shadow album...
|
| https://www.discogs.com/release/324160-DJ-Shadow-The-Private...
| thomasqbrady wrote:
| 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...
| xrd wrote:
| My editor got really mad when I tried to switch my animal so I
| got stuck with a beagle, my least favorite dog.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm imagining a sitcom scene where authors get into a fight
| over who got the best animal.
| daveslash wrote:
| .... 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.
| andylynch wrote:
| I'd noticed this owing to Hadley Wickham's R books - all
| fittingly feature birds native to New Zealand.
| [deleted]
| hwers wrote:
| Shouldn't the real link be
| https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreil...
| thunderbong wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Changed from https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp. Thanks!
| blueyes wrote:
| 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.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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.
| bluehex wrote:
| 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
| rr808 wrote:
| 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?
| acomjean wrote:
| 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.
| elcapitan wrote:
| > 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.
| dragonquest wrote:
| 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.
| elcapitan wrote:
| 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).
| s1mon wrote:
| A friend once quipped that each O'Reilly book you read was worth
| a 10k bump in salary.
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| > 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
| dang wrote:
| 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)
| snickmy wrote:
| The light cream golden retriever has not been taken yet. Quick to
| closest word editor !
| iggldiggl wrote:
| 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.
| thunderbong wrote:
| 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.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| > 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...
| bin_bash wrote:
| 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
| jszymborski wrote:
| 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_...
| [deleted]
| optimalsolver wrote:
| My favorite is the slightly creepy MicroPython cover:
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/programming-with-microp...
| avl999 wrote:
| 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.
| andrewl wrote:
| I just checked, and the O RLY Cover Generator is still active if
| you want to make your own:
|
| https://dev.to/rly
| JFKKFJ wrote:
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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.
| bch wrote:
| > 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...
| andylynch wrote:
| Maybe less so now, but the early ones were most certainly
| distinctive. Especially the Camel book! (Programming Perl)
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Talking about camels, I haven't found 'Real World OCaml' on
| their website.
|
| https://dev.realworldocaml.org/index.html
| DocTomoe wrote:
| 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.
| sandymcmurray wrote:
| 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...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Something about that species makes me profoundly uncomfortable
| every time I see it...
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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).
| jetrink wrote:
| 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
| jimmysong wrote:
| 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.
| rory wrote:
| 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
| daveaiello wrote:
| 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.
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