This I have been wondering for years! And where else was I supposed to ask this if not here?
Maybe it is not a technical question but it might still interest a great many.
tex-history
This I have been wondering for years! And where else was I supposed to ask this if not here?
Maybe it is not a technical question but it might still interest a great many.
Best Answer
I think the comments above make as good an answer as any would so I've taken the liberty of assembling them into a single CW answer.
The TeX lion was designed for the illustrations of the first TeXBook. Duane Bibby is the artist. He describes the genesis of the idea in a 2006 interview this way:
The LaTeX Book and The Metafont Book were also illustrated with Bibby's lions, which further enforced the brand.
The TeX Talk logo designed by Pablo is an homage to Bibby. TeX StackExchange users would love to have the lion further incorporated into site graphics, but the money required to hire Bibby has not surfaced. See
CTAN has a lion illustration that is liberally licensed; Jim Hefferon owns it and requests that proper attribution (to the artist) be made. In fact we used it for our captcha screens. (The linked page in turn links to several scanned versions that are available for appropriate uses.)
Some more history: At the "coming out party" for the first hardbound set of Computers & Typesetting, at the Computer Museum in Boston, 21 May 1986, Don Knuth concluded his remarks with a comment on "why a lion?" (p.98). The introductory remarks by Knuth's editor, Peter Gordon, provide more general background about the occasion.