Throwback Thursdays in Tech History: O'Reilly Animals
Published: 2023-12-14 18:48:44

---
title: Throwback Thursdays in Tech History: O'Reilly Animals
published: true
date: 2023-12-14 00:00:00 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://gingerkiwi.dev/blog/2023-12-14-tech-history-oreily-animals/
---

The animals on O'Reilly programming books have become well known. Many popular books are referred to by their animal cover instead of their title. _"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web"_ is commonly referred to as _"The Polar Bear Book"_. But how did a technical book publisher end up with drawings of animals as their most recognized and beloved brand symbols? There's even a [GitHub gist](https://gist.github.com/briandfoy/d68915eb425e1fc4932ceac5cdf2d60d) with all the book names and their associated cover animals by [Brian d Foy](https://github.com/briandfoy) author of several books on Perl.

## O'Reilly Origins

O'Reilly started out as a technical writing company in 1978 creating UNIX and related manuals for clients. By the early 1980s they kept the rights to their manuals and started a mail order business. Their customers would receive plain brown cover manuals known as "Nutshell Handbooks" visibly held together with staples.

But Tim O'Reilly wasn't happy with the cover design of the first two books for book shops. One of his marketing department staff's neighbours was Edie Freedman. It was Freedman who would come up with the idea of having animals on the cover of O'Reilly books - partly because the names and terminology in computer programming were as weird and strange as some animals.

> “I had heard of Unix, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I’d never met a Unix programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. Even the terms associated with Unix — _vi, sed_ and _awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses,_ to name just a few — were weird. They sounded to me like words that might come out of Dungeons and Dragons, a game that was popular with a geeky (mostly male) subculture.” ~ Edie Freeman in [A Short History of the O'Reilly Animals](https://www.oreilly.com/content/a-short-history-of-the-oreilly-animals/)

Tim O'Reilly liked Freedman's idea. The first three O'Reilly books with animal covers were all UNIX books: , lorises, and Victoria crowned pigeons

- [_Learning the vi Editor_](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596529833.do) with a Tarsier
- [_sed & awk_](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003524.do) a Lorises
- [_lex & yacc_](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565920002.do)Victoria crowned pigeons

The first pictures came from reprints of 1700s and 1800s wood cuts by [Dover Pictorial Archives](https://www.overdrive.com/series/dover-pictorial-archive.) For several decades the animals were greyscale drawings, but starting in February, 2019 with [Natural Language Processing with PyTorch](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/natural-language-processing/9781491978221/)the cover illustrations are now in full colour. Many are now hand drawn. Artists include:

- [Lorrie LeJeune](https://www.media.mit.edu/people/lorrie/overview/)
- Karen Montgomery

Karen Montgomery converted 12 of the illustrations into a colouring book that was published by O'Reilly in 2016. The pages are now available as a [free pdf colouring book](http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/oreilly/pdfs/coloring_book_downloadable.pdf?imm_mid=0eba50) on the O'Reilly website.

The artists and O'Reilly also try to bring call attention to how many of the cover animals are endangered or threatened. In 2012 the company launched the [O'Reilly Animals campaign](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/oreilly-animals-technology-community-endangered-species-extinction/) speared on by Tim O'Reilly's mantra _"Work on things that matter."_

As of today there are 1340 animal books listed on O'Reilly's dedicated [The Animal Megnarie Page](https://www.oreilly.com/animals.csp), as well as numerous articles giving advice to authors on how to pick their animal. What started out with one woman's brilliant idea has become an iconic and beloved growing collection of 1340 book covers.