Turkish tabby

A lovely story via Lee jay Stoltzfus' Rare Book News from a Turkish newspaper about a bookstore in Turkey which has attracted some eleven street cats over the last few years. These literary moggies like Nuri Bulut's bookstore so much they haven't left, happily catnapping on coffee table editions, purring on poetry and lounging on the literature. So what does a feline of letters enjoy reading?


My girls, Pandora and Cassie are comics fans, with a special liking for Catwoman (of course), although they also enjoy the Black Panther but have mixed feelings about Black Canary... Their favourite character in the Sandman is, understandably, Bast. What else do cats read? T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats must be a contender. Crime-loving mogs presumably enjoy Lilian Braun's Cat Who... series. Younger kittens enjoy The Cat in the Hat, Puss in Boots and are all very fond of Delilah and the Cheshire Cat in the Alice novels by Lewis Carroll.


The world of books and felines do seem to go together quite often. Back in Ye Earlye Days of Ye Olde Internette, before the web and GUI interfaces one of the online discussions I was subscribed to was a literary one (surprise) mostly made up of folk in Britain, America, Canada and Australia who worked in libraries, bookstores, publishing etc. We did notice that cats were mentioned rather often in the course of our discussions, so we decided to hold an impromtu survey and, quelle surpise, we found that a high proportion of booksellers and librarians had cats. I wonder why that is?

And it is far from a modern phenomenon as a poem in the ravishing Canongate collection The Great Book of Gaelic by a medieval monk shows, as he writes of his cat keeping him company as he sits at his scribe's desk. I'm sure there is a study in there for someone's thesis.