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 animal featured on the cover of Managing Mailing Lists is a three-toed woodpecker. There are approximately 380 species of woodpecker scattered all over the world, with the exception of Madagascar, New Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand. Woodpeckers use their strong, straight bills to drill or chisel tree trunks in order to reach the insects inside. Their quest for dinner is also aided by tongues that are extremely extensible and often covered in barbs and a sticky saliva-like substance. They support themselves upright against tree trunks with their stiff tail feathers. Most woodpeckers also support themselves with the use of four toes, two facing forward and two facing back.

The three-toed woodpecker, however, lacks the first, backward-facing toe. These birds get at their food by chiseling at the tree trunk, requiring that they throw their heads far back before each blow. Having an additional backward-facing toe would impede these efforts. Three-toed woodpeckers prefer swampy woods and the remnants of burnt forests. Insects are abundant in these habitats. They are harder workers than many of the fellow woodpeckers, and they search each tree thoroughly to get every last larva. A final distinction between the three-toed woodpecker and many other woodpeckers is that their heads are yellow, not the red commonly associated with woodpeckers. 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 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher OLeary.

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