Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animals featured on the cover of Managing Usenet are domestic fowl. Chickens have been domesticated for at least 4000 years. Nearly all of the ancient civilizations kept domestic fowl. There are currently approximately 150 breeds of domestic fowl. Selective breeding has led to the development of fowl with a variety of body types, colors, skull features, feather density, and tail feather length. Today chickens are raised primarily for egg and meat production. Wild fowl live in small flocks in which a pecking order becomes established among both hens and roosters. Rank fights begin when chicks are only a few weeks old. Until relatively recently most domestic fowl lived in these small flocks, also. However, economics have now prevailed, and on most modern chicken farms the birds live in small, windowless, temperature-controlled coops. Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with QuarkXPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.

The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in gtroff by Lenny Muellner. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 7.0 and Adobe Photoshop 4.0 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary, with assistance from Kevin O'Leary.

Whenever possible, our books use RepKover, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKovers limit, perfect binding is used.