"A Fur Person must be adopted by catly humans, tactful, delicate respectful, indulgent; these are fairly rare, though not as rare as might be supposed." --from May Sarton's The Fur Person, which isn't technically about a bookstore cat, though protagonist Tom Jones is a very literary feline indeed.
Bookstore cats and booksellers share many traits, perhaps none so much as a keen awareness and appreciation for the homes they ultimately find in bookshops after long and arduous journeys.
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Molly, a Shelf Awareness editorial cat, finds a copy of Wendy Welch's The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap in the stacks. |
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It was destiny, I suppose--a crucial moment in infancy--that sealed my fate as a bookstore cat guy. For my first Christmas, when I was eight months old, one of my aunts gave me an autographed and inscribed copy of The Blue Cat of Castle Town by Catherine Cate Coblentz, illustrated by Janice Holland. It was a Newbery Honor Book in 1950, the year of my birth, though of course I wasn't aware of that at the time. My initial review was probably that it tasted good when I chewed the cover.
My aunt lived in Castleton, Vt., which served as the 19th Century setting for this tale of a blue cat searching for "a hearth where a mortal understood and sang that song" of beauty, peace and contentment.
Unfortunately, I never worked in a bookstore that had a resident cat. Some of my favorite bookshops do, but I couldn't begin to showcase them all. We occasionally highlight bibliocats of note in Shelf Awareness, like the award-winning Amelia of the Spiral Bookcase, Philadelphia, Pa.; petcam-wearing Molly Bloom at Annie Bloom's Books, Portland, Ore.; or Franny the Instagram sensation at Skylight Books, Los Angeles.
And I have my personal favorites:
Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of The Lonesome Pine bookshop in Big Stone Gap, Va., offers bookstore cat internships in collaboration with a local shelter. Sporting new names with a literary pedigree, they get to roam the stacks (or perch on the branches of the Christmas book tree) while she helps them find "forever homes" via the bookshop's Facebook page. Wherever they end up, the kitties will always be honorary bookstore cats.
I've also grown quite fond of Cake and Lemon at BooksActually in Singapore. Owner Kenny Leck's irresistible resident feline booksellers appear regularly on Facebook, but also provide a legion of fans with updates on their own Twitter accounts, @caketheking and @lemonthekisser.
Recently I learned that in China, the "20 cats that inhabit the Xinhua Bookstore entertain customers, wander freely and jump from one bookshelf to another. The bookstore, also home to the Nanjing Cat Café, has a wall covered with hydroponic flowers and luscious plants. Part of the revenue earned at the café is used to buy food for the cats that live in the store and also for stray cats outside." Nice.
To honor of bibliocats everywhere this holiday season, I'd like to offer you a gift by recommending a great read: Takashi Hiraide's small gem of a novel The Guest Cat, translated by Eric Selland (New Directions). It's one of my favorite books of 2014, and I'm not alone.
The Guest Cat, which was an unanticipated New York Times bestseller in the U.S. earlier this year, has more recently become a holiday season hit in the U.K. The Independent reported that "booksellers loved it. They placed it in their windows, on their front tables.... Just a few months after publication, it has sold 20,000 copies, an unimaginable figure for a title without a marketing campaign. It is now set to be among December's top sellers and is already the biggest-selling paperback of the year at one branch of Waterstones, in London's Gower Street."
"It's such an easy book to sell," said branch manager Alison Belshaw. "There is the physicality of the book for starters: it looks beautiful. It's also short.... And you can read it as a simple story, or see all sorts of depths to it." Belshaw recalled a man who came into the shop looking for a sci-fi novel: "And I sent him away with The Guest Cat. It's that kind of book. You want to recommend it to everyone."
Like the Fur Person and the Blue Cat and bookstore cats (and booksellers) worldwide, Chibi the "guest cat" is worth meeting, though getting to know her will be, as it must, just a little more complicated ("Chibi remained unfettered, coming and going as she pleased."). That's why she's my honorary bookstore cat of the year, and why you might consider giving her a "forever home" on your bookshelves. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)