But, my Pink Camel bit of nostalgia is a Pink Camel t-shirt. It's signed (cryptically) by Tom, Peter Prymmer, Randal, and Larry. That gets worn rarely, usually when I teach a long Perl class and run out of Con shirts to wear.

The story (some is speculation) goes that in October 1996, the publication of the Blue Camel (1st edition) was Any Day Now. O'Reilly was supposed to have the first shipment of them at the LISA X conference in Chicago, and had a book signing scheduled for that night. Only one problem -- no books. Friends of mine and I scoured the city to find a Blue Camel and found that other people were doing the same and there were none to be had at any price. You could pre-order them from ORA (which I did), but not actually get one. So ORA has hundreds of anxious sysadmins and no books. Instead they crack open a crate of t-shirts and let the autographing begin.

So the cover on the book in the shirt is Pink, but it was for the debut of the Blue Camel. Go figure. :)