It was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with The Earth Compels, I Crossed the Minch and Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay.

(In the last chapter of the book, MacNeice notes that: "As I write this on Primrose Hill I can hear the lions roaring in the Zoo.")

Nancy Coldstream had earlier provided illustrations for I Crossed the Minch, a book on the Hebrides by Louis MacNeice.

Zoo was a Book Society Recommendation and, as Jon Stallworthy notes in his biography of Louis MacNeice, it "sold well enough, though much less well than Modern Poetry.

"[5] MacNeice worked on Zoo, writing little else, through June, July and the first half of August 1938, taking the occasional break to watch tennis at Wimbledon or cricket at Lord's.

The literary critic Samuel Hynes, writing in the London Review of Books,[8] quotes the following passage from Zoo to illustrate how MacNeice commonly presented himself as a lover of ordinary pleasures: "The pleasure of dappled things, the beauty of adaptation to purpose, the glory of extravagance, classic elegance or romantic nonsense and grotesquerie – all these we get from the Zoo.

We react to these with the same delight as to new potatoes in April speckled with chopped parsley or to the lights at night on the Thames of Battersea Power House, or to cars sweeping their shadows from lamp-post to lamp-post down Haverstock Hill or to brewer’s drays or to lighthouses and searchlights or to a newly cut lawn or to a hot towel or a friction at the barber’s or to Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937 or to the smell of dusting-powder in a warm bathroom or to the fun of shelling peas into a china bowl or of shuffling one’s feet through dead leaves when they are crisp or to the noise of rain or the crackling of a newly lit fire or the jokes of a street-hawker or the silence of snow in moonlight or the purring of a powerful car.