Colophon
The animal on the cover of Intel Threading Building Blocks is a wild canary (Serinus canaria), a small songbird in the finch family. It is also known as an island canary or Atlantic canary because it is native to islands off western Europe, particularly Madeira, Azores, and the Canary Islands, for which the bird was named. The name comes from the Latin canaria (“of the dogs”), first used by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia because of the large dogs roaming the Islands. Canaries live in orchards, farmlands, and copses, and make their nests in bushes and trees.
Although the wild canary is darker and slightly larger than the domestic canary, it is otherwise similar in appearance. Its breast is yellow-green and its back is streaked with brown. Like many species, the male is more vibrantly colored than the female. The male also has a sweeter song. When the Spanish conquered the Islands in the 15th century, they domesticated the birds and began to breed them. By the 16th century, canaries were prized as pets throughout Europe. (Samuel Pepys writes about his “canary birds” in a 1661 diary entry.) Five hundred years of selective breeding have produced many canary varieties, including the bright yellow type common today. The small birds are popular pets because they can live up to 10 years, require little special attention, and are considered to have the most melodious song of all birds.
As late as the 1980s, coal miners used canaries as a warning system, with two birds in each coal pit. According to the U.S. Bureau of Mines, canaries were preferred to mice because they are more sensitive to fumes and more visibly show distress in the presence of gas. A canary in a mine would chirp all day, but if the carbon monoxide level rose, it would stop singing and sway on its perch before falling dead—warning the miners to get out fast.
The cover image is from J. G. Wood’s Animate Creation. The cover font is Adobe ITC Garamond. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSans Mono Condensed.