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 appearing on the cover of Frontier: The Definitive Guide is popularly known as an American buffalo, correctly called a bison. Bison are the largest mammals in North America: mature males stand about 6.5 feet tall at the shoulder, and weight almost a ton. They generally live in herds, which vary in size and movement. Bison are usually dark brown, and their front half is overdeveloped, with especially pronounced withers and a thick growth of long, dark hair. Bulls fight over cows during mating season (late summer), and have a generally unpre dictable temperament, ranging from quiet to fierce. Born after a gestation period of nine months, the young nurse for about a year, and mature after two or three years. A bison's lifespan is typically 20-25 years, with some living 10 or 15 years longer than average.

Bison were revered by the Plains tribe of Native Americans, who put every piece of them to practical and/or ceremonial use, including hide, hair, flesh, bones, organs, horns, hooves, excrement, and fat. Held especially sacred was the extremely rare white bison, appearing only once in several million. The Plains society was intertwined with and entirely dependent upon the bison. By most estimates, there were approximately 60 million bison in North America in the early eighteenth century. Intent on settling the American West and overtaking the Native American civilization, white settlers very nearly brought about the complete extinction of bison by the late nineteenth century through methodical hunting for food and sport. Some of the most extreme incidents were linked with the construction and journeys of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s, first through the killing of huge numbers of bison to supply workers with food, and later through passengers' sport of shooting as many bison as they pleased from the train and taking only the tongue as a delicacy, leaving piles of carcasses along the tracks.

By the mid-1880s, white settlers had effectively wiped out the bison population, reduced from their former millions to well under a thousand; only the efforts of a few cattlemen and conservationists in the early twentieth century saved them from extinction. Today, bison herds in wildlife preserves and other ranges are sufficient to ensure survival of the species. ... Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.32 using the ITC Garamond font. Whenever possible, our books use RepKover™TM, a durable and flexible lay-flat binding. If the page count exceeds RepKover™'s limit, perfect binding is used.

The inside layout was designed by Nancy Priest and implemented in FrameMaker 5.0 by Mike Sierra. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Adobe Photoshop 4 by Robert Romano. This colophon was written by Nancy Wolfe Kotary.