The Animal Covers

Linda Lamb, one of the writers on staff, asked her neighbor, a graphic designer named Edie Freedman, if she'd be interested in making a proposal for our book covers. Edie had never heard of any of these Unix terms, like vi and uucp and sed and awk. It seemed like the people who were the main customer base would be the sort of people who would be into weird sci-fi stuff and games like Dungeons and Dragons. So, the first covers she sketched out incorporated strange 19th century animal engravings.

Edie's earliest sketches for the Animal Books, and the cover of Programming with curses today.

The covers Edie proposed would have been fairly inexpensive to produce: the animal engravings were free (public domain) and the covers were designed for two-color printing.

The response to the sketches at the O'Reilly office in Newton, Massachusetts was mixed. After posting them on the office bulletin board for a while, the decision was made to give the animal covers a shot. Thus, the Animal Books were born. The first books in the series were Using the vi Editor, sed & awk, Programming with curses, and two books on uucp.

Many of the animals that appear on our covers are now drawn by Lorrie LeJeune, who also happens to be one of our editors. Read about the process Lorrie goes through to create these unique and wonderful images.