cat

Comfort in Cats

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Just coming off the Louis Wain Catland bio (I posted about that last week and it can be found here) I am self-consciously thoughtful suddenly about how the public sentiment about cats has shifted over the past 100+ years since humans just started finding their sea legs with them as domestic beloveds.

It wasn’t long after the Victorian period that cats were taken up in popular advertising at the dawn of the 20th century. This grinning black kit with the yellow bow was the longstanding spokes-cat for the Black Cat Hosiery company and was so popular for decades that the advertising items from it remain in high demand and often is quite pricey today. (This bit of an ad with thanks to Sandi Outland, via @curiositiesantique who sent it several months back – the the sea, my desk has spit it up from the depths for today’s consideration and helped inspire this post.)

I have written about the company on other occasions so if you want more info on the company you can find it in a post here – and more here. The above ad is from a July, 1907 McCalls magazine and other ads on the page are for, most fascinatingly, H&H Pneumatic Bust Forms (yes, like stuffing your bra – no one will know) and Modene hair removal for face, neck and arms – it cannot fail! Our black cat was in good company.

Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

So in a mere few decades cats began to morph into the area they would command for many decades to come. However, I think it is fair to say that with the part of our lives that are now lived online some of us have taken our interest in cats to a much more highly developed level.

A photo of a young Betty Butler, holding our cat Snoopy back in the 1960’s from a Mother’s Day post this year.

Speaking for myself, my interest in cats began as a small child. Pictorama readers know that I have written numerous times about my childhood cat friends, Snoopy, a white cat with black cow spots with whom I shared many important childish conversations. But there was also Pumpkin who came to me as a tiny kitten ball of orange fluff and grew into an enormous faded-orange tabby who followed me around with dog-like devotion. As I got older my cat Winkie, a tiny tortie polydactyl with huge toed front paws like mitts, was my particular confidant. As a young adult Otto Dix (Miss Otto Dix), a tuxie from a corn farm in New Jersey, became my constant companion and closest friend, a very special cat especially smart cat who I still miss to this day.

However, until relatively recent years, my love and interest in cats (other than what I collect of course) was limited largely to those I knew – mostly my own or those of my mother. I suppose it started even before the pandemic, but certainly during those long days and nights that following cats online became a habit. First there was Maru the Japanese cat (to be precise, a Scottish Straight cat who lives in Japan) who can’t resist box and likes to get into boxes, some that are way too small for him. There was the somewhat neurotic French cat, Henri, a long haired tuxie who has Existential angst. The French also brought us cats playing Paddy Cake which never fails to make me laugh and for some reason is only funny to me in the French – there is an English version.

Still, those were occasional and one-off entertainment. I believe for me that cats as a form of online entertainment and escapism was born of the darkest period of the pandemic, fueled by late nights of waking up and worrying about work. Unable to sleep, I would read Judy Bolton novels (the first in a lot of early series books I read and I wrote about Judy Bolton here) and take a spin through Instagram, sometimes buying the odd item, but also entering the world of cats online and sometimes following even their most daily routines.

I’m probably skipping ahead a bit but Sadie and Dottie (@sadieanddottie), a tuxie and a white kit with cow spots, and who appear to live in Queens, brightened many a dark day when I realized a new post or story had been posted. These largely consist of these two cats growing up, but mostly doing cat stuff like watching birds and napping. Yes, I can watch my own cats do that (although Deitch Studio is situated a little high for birds out the window) and I do, but it turns out I like to watch other cats do it too.

A screen grab of this little video of Sadie.

With almost 14,000 viewers cat mom Lauren Grummel and cat dad Chas Reynolds, Jr. appear to have their hands full supplying frequent doses of their kitties going through their daily paces. A favorite post is an imaginative one of Sadie (the tux) sailing away on a boat at night in search of parents who will give her more treats instead of telling her she’s had enough. (Find it here.)

There is @Fatfink (aka Devlin Thompson) who I first got to know on Facebook, but now is an Instagram constant. His record of the comings and goings of his small menagerie of four cats, (these days Clawford, Kookie, Mr. Biscuits and Miss Rupert), which includes some recent rescues and things like his daily fight over his dinner with them or other such tidbits, are interspersed with an aligned interest in comics – but it is really over the kits that we bond. He sends me great cat videos too which I often find first thing in the morning and cheer my day.

Newly acquired Clawford.
Clawford recently introduced to this rather rarified Deitch portfolio!

A friend on the west coast started supplying me with both funny and moving video snippets of cats during the difficult period of caring for my mother although she continues to send them since I like them so much. These videos, many from The Dodo are chock-a-block full of cats paired with a myriad of other odd animals as friends (deer, dogs, cows) or doing un-catlike activities like motorcycle riding or boating. It is especially lovely and a real kindness as she herself isn’t especially fond of cats so she seeks them out just for me.

Most recently I have fallen hard for team Penny and Felix on Instagram. Penny (@pennythegingercat) is a somewhat sardonic and absolutely adorable orange tabby female (yes, a rarity) and Felix (@felixthepalegingercat) her younger brother, a lean and lanky light orange fellow. (Penny alone has upwards of 650,000 followers!)

The antics of these two (two accounts means twice the fun) include but are not limited to: Felix’s impatience over getting his breakfast in the morning, Penny’s preference of Dad over Mom, Penny sleeping as a face down loaf and the like. These have cheered me endlessly over the past year. Highlights have included Penny entering the Olympics this year as a gold medal winning cat loaf champion and I credit the duo for having invented the term skippity pap (or at least made it enter my personal lexicon) – which is accompanied by a sort of whoosh-smack sound effect that is especially satisfying. It is among the few accounts I turn my sound on for routinely.

The dynamic cat duo’s mom and dad (mom is the voice over for the most part) do a brilliant job of editing, voice over – they are top pros at it and I bless them daily for these inventive missives that come over my transom, brightening all days. Quite simply I cannot recommend them enough for a cat dopamine daily dose.

Four out of the NJ Five here – Gus missing.
Blackie and Cookie peevishly sharing the bed with each other and of course Kim recently.

I have written before about social media and my belief that if content is carefully chosen and tended it can be a rabbit hole of blissful escapism. During the brutal hustle and full-on assault of our shifting political world I have found myself diving deeply into this somewhat alternate universe of cats. As the mother of the NYC duo Cookie and Blackie, and the Jersey Five (Beau, Milty, Gus, Peaches and Stormy) and the head of fundraising for a major emergency animal hospital – you’d think I would get enough daily dose of the kitty world, but simply, no – quite simply, I prefer even more.

I started subscribing to a daily newspaper in high school and have more or less read one daily every since, butI lately find my ability to read above the fold reduced to a nervous skittering across headlines as I head down the page to stories about things like a research study on puppy kindergarten – the super socializing of puppies to see if they make better service animals (NYT and can be found here). So today I pay tribute to those folks online who may not inform my politics, nor deliver my news, but who are vital community which cheers my daily existence.

Let the Season Begin

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: A friend and colleague who began her life in Finland (she lives in Ohio today and works remotely for me a few hours a week), told me the other day that when she was little parents were so invested in the idea of the Christmas holiday that it was common to hire a Santa to come to the house. She said that when she realized that Santa wasn’t real, she felt she could not say anything because it would hurt her parents.

I love that story, and I have great affection for this card I just bought which shows the other side of Nordic holiday spirit. I am unsure what country this originally hailed from, although I purchased it from someone in the Netherlands who also did not know the origin of the card. There is a tiny NTG in the lower left corner and writing in another language and incredibly small that I cannot decipher. The internet was not much help on this front although another seller of postcards thought NTG was German. I have not found evidence of other cards like it, but perhaps a series of them lurks somewhere yet.

Gnomes are evidently thought to deliver Christmas presents in Scandinavia in the 18th and 19th centuries, helpers to Father Christmas. (Families left bowls of porridge for them – perhaps a bit less appealing than our cookies and milk!) I would suspect this is where the idea of our elves as Santa’s helpers come from.

I will say that I purchased this card on eBay for very little and utterly uncontested! I gather that I am the only one who was looking who saw its charm, but I am pleased to add it to the Pictorama collection.

Of course it turned up for me because of the weird tabby cat. If you look very closely he appears to have a tiny antler, possibly drawn on. Puss seems to be pouncing on him while this gnome protects Santa with this long stick. Santa and the gnome are small children in costume and the cat is, well a cat, probably one that hung around the photo studio catching mice and playing bit parts. His tail is curled upward and we can see his nice white tummy and white feet. I think we can assume if left to his own devices he would have liked to knead biscuits on the Santa suit and take a cat nap.

Santa plays his role with some drama – oh no, the antlered cat attack – his cottony beard, brows and hair contributing to his look. The gnome goes at it with great gusto as well. Also beard and with curling hair coming out of his pointy cap (his own?) he grins with gnome-ish fervor as he saves Santa. I like his pointy shoes.

One can imagine that the day shooting this was pretty much a good time for all. The set certainly is stark with a few large stones to the left and in front and this sort of nest of twigs behind the gnome. In addition to that odd little antler being drawn in, a very careful examination shows a very small smattering of white dots down the middle of the card which I assume are meant to be snowflakes. Otherwise this is a rather barren set making it feel a bit like Santa on the Moon.

Back of the card – no evidence of being mailed despite being addressed.

I share the back of this card which I cannot decipher although omitie appears to be Romanian and means to omit – I assume that this was meant to say – I didn’t forget Edmund! While fully addressed there is no evidence of it being mailed with a stamp or cancellation. The writing in pencil seems to be earlier seller’s marks. So was it just dropped by a mailbox perhaps?

So here we go, kicking off this holiday season here at Pictorama. This photo postcard embodies both some humor, but also a tiny bit of historic grit and well, a pleasant sort of meanness. Just what we need as we sally forth into the season ahead.

Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I haven’t posted a book review in a very long time and I am not entirely sure I have ever written one for a contemporary volume (Kim Deitch books notwithstanding of course), let alone a non-fictions one. (My reading and therefore posting runs heavily to very early 20th century fiction, largely by women. For a few examples you can look here and here.)

However, it seems quite logical that I would break that ground today with this recently published book as it combines Louis Wain (of whom I have posted often – try here and here for items from my collection) and the Victorian cat craze which helped launch the cat as house pet relationship as we know it today. Catland Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes is more or less hot off the presses. Hughes has worked the Victorian history side of the street before and draws heavily on her accumulated knowledge for this sizeable volume.

The Naughty Puss by Louis Wain.

Hughes uses Wain’s biography as a rough parallel to the rise of cat breeding and ownership – perhaps a fair measure as one could say that Wain’s art, intertwined with the newly found fondness for felines, helped drive the mania but was also driven by it. She loads it up with an equal amount of stories and tidbits from broader Victorian life, but centered mostly on a newly formed cat craze as it were.

While Hughes does take the opportunity to set both Wain’s autobio and previous chroniclers straight on some points, his biographical bits are interspersed throughout by chapters devoted to other aspects of cat related Victorian life. (Somehow I had missed the fact that Wain had a cleft palate which was largely hidden by facial hair as an adult and I had no knowledge of the family history designing and making liturgical fabrics – the latter being of much interest when you consider his sense of pattern and design.) Evidently Wain gilded the facts of his life liberally (lied) during his lifetime making some of it up out of whole cloth more or less.

circa 1900: Cat artist Louis William Wain (1860 – 1939) draws inspiration from a pet. (Photo by Ernest H. Mills/Getty Images)

Hughes’s Wain is a socially awkward fellow, albeit it with flashes of attempted showmanship, who was most comfortable wandering off into his own world, In his public persona he judged (the newly created) cat shows, gave demonstrations of two fisted simultaneous cat drawing, and wrote some vaguely (and then increasingly) unhinged editorial pieces for the papers of the time. On the other side of the coin, he and his family declared bankruptcy more than once; he had a tendency to wander off for periods of time, and of course eventually he sadly drifts (almost retreats) into his decorative cat laden world of insanity.

Much the same could be said about Victorian England and its relationship to felines. First, it is clear that there was a pretty hard line between the nascent “purebred” (often pampered) pets of the day, and the run of the mill kitty of the street. The practice of bringing a street kitten or cat into your home was not the norm and, aside from those which were kept for work such as mousing, those cats were at best left to languish in the streets.

Tabbies in the Park and black and white print by Wain.

Some of the Victorian practices concerning cats are not for the weak of cat-loving heart to read so fair warning here. There were descriptions and stories I glossed over at best and I suggest same for Pictorama readers. A chapter on Victorian taxidermy (including a woman with a literal cat hat and cat tail cape – Eeeck!) isn’t even the worst of it as the period does seem to have a glib cruelty to it. However, not all the cat tales are bad ones and there were numerous fun bits and pieces that I’ve been reporting to Kim in bed for weeks now.

The book is gloriously well illustrated including, but happily not limited to a color section. Wain’s work lends itself even to black and white reproduction and Hughes uses it to good effect in support of her points as well as being fun to look at.

My favorite chapter in the book was on the Wain futuristic ceramics which I have always had an interest in and it answered at least some of my questions about these. A somewhat luxe line of teapots and the like in true Futurist forms, Wain had the bad luck of launching his line in June of ’14, just as war was overtaking Europe and Great Britain. Not the best time for offbeat ceramic cat-ware.

A bevy of the ceramics!

Produced by a company called Max Emanuel there were 19 patented designs in the first batch with names as diverse as The Mascot Cat and Road Hog Cat. The choice of colors where the larger designs were produced was referred to by a critic as an angry cake decorator on acid. Evidently there was even at inception a riot of designs, colors and finishes for the items, manufactured at two different plants which would make positive identification hard even then and almost impossible now that forgeries have flowed into the market. Still, I would snatch one up if I could and liked it and remain unconcerned about proof of origin.

The most disappointing chapter was on Wain and Felix! Other than the story of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Felix factory on the East End of London being told (Pictorama readers may remember that from a very popular early post that can be found here), Hughes does a rough retelling of a the plot of a silent cartoon that is easily viewed on Youtube. I’m mystified by why she included Felix if she was so disinterested.

Christmas was a favorite and very lucrative time of the year for Wain from the beginning of his career.

Wain and his sisters eventually leave London to reside in a suburban seaside town near Margate (one of his boosters in the magazine world was an early investor and set them up there), and this holiday retreat lifestyle inspires some of Wain’s most entertaining cards and images – cats golfing, boating and swimming as well as sly social commentary found even in Catland.

From the Pams-Pictorama.com collection. Sadly not Wain and Eliot, not yet…

Meanwhile, of course I have wonderful day dreams about Louis actually wandering over to the Felix photographers in Margate where so many of my Felix photos were made and having a postcard made with an arm tossed around the shoulders of a tall stuffed Felix – this is now united with my day dream of finding one of the giant Felix dolls from those establishments.

Furthermore, as it happens eventually TS Eliot was also nursing a nervous breakdown in the neighborhood – in a town just on the other side of Margate. It is irresistible to imagine that they met at that time, perhaps had a coffee and were strolling the boardwalk together. And perhaps they wandered in and had a picture postcard snapped for posterity – to show up in my collection one day.

Pillow Puss

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today’s is a rare contemporary cat purchase, one which may be familiar to some because it came from Target. It is a limited edition Halloween item by the interior designer John Derian. As it happens I had recently read an article on Derian’s house in Provincetown. (A friend sent it to me and this may or may not be the precise one here.) Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have known who he is and passed it by.

This article produced some house envy (I wonder if that is the point of the article in a sense), but more importantly made me want to visit the small shop on his property where he seems to sell the overflow from his own antiques collecting in addition to his own line. Oh to be able to paw through that on a regular basis! Alas, I haven’t been to Provincetown in many years so it is unlikely. He has a shop in the West Village but that one seems more dedicated to his life of housewares, rather than those bits that help inspire them.

John Derian store next to his house in Provincetown. Lovely looking bits.

So I went down the rabbit hole of the email Target promo for his collection, figuring that anyone who had cool stuff couldn’t be all bad and might make some Halloween items I should see. And he did. Given a lot of space and a surfeit of spending money I might have purchased more, but I was restrained and only came away with this reproduction of an antique cat, made into a sizeable cushiony pillow.

The cat, which as I write is still available on the Target site (although also already at an approximately 100% mark-up on eBay, let the buyer beware!), with the following description:

…This novelty pillow features artwork by decoupage artist John Derian that showcases a black cat wearing a red bow collar with a jingle bell and yellow eyes. Made of 100% cotton fabric with polyester filling, this black plush pillow offers soft comfort, and the sewn-seam closure provides a neat-finished look.

John Derian is an American decoupage artist and designer living in New York City whose aesthetic encapsulates a curious mix of natural oddities, antiques and eccentricities.

It is a tad confusing – did he make a decoupage cat and then they reproduced it? I assume that’s what they mean, although there is no real indication of the decoupage and of course I’d be curious to see the original if there is one. Still, the man has a good eye.

The shape is similar to a popular design of a flat stuffed cat one frequently sees. One in the category is for sale on eBay now, some are older than others.

Cat pillow. Not in Pams-Pictorama.com collection.

Kitty is about 16″ high and the bell hung on his nice bow rings. He is pleasantly pillow cushy. He is, of course, black with a jolly red face and fur indicated. His big yellow eyes stare and he has a toothy (but not all the way to cartoony, nor scary) grin. He is charmingly goofy.

Pams-Pictorama.com collection, still available at Target.com

I admit to having been tempted by Derian’s platters with skeletons dancing on them – if we spent more time in Jersey they might be put to use there – and from his Thanksgiving line, the asparagus candles entertain me and the turkey would also make a fun centerpiece. As my Thanksgiving needs appear to be modest at best (and in the house with five cats – lit candles don’t have a chance there!) I am unlikely prey for these holiday temptations, at least this year. His own line of upscale dishes, with beautiful images from nature, are a bit rich for my blood – especially as I seem to be hard on plates and cups.

However, this kitty will join a large black cat head pillow in New Jersey – future post! For a nice cuddle on our bed or a day bed in the space where Kim works upstairs, he will be perfect. Meanwhile, that house is slowly transforming into a cat refuge of an antique sort as well. We’ll see what the Jersey five think of him come Thanksgiving!

Luck and Prosperity

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Although some would certainly argue that Deitch Studio’s decor is Halloween each and every day of the year, in reality we don’t really do holiday decorations here. When I was younger I made room for a small artificial Christmas tree (a future post about my mother and her feelings about real trees) and an oversized light up Santa. As cats do, ours at the time liked it very much, pretending they were in a forest fairyland, and I did too. However, the one room that makes up the apartment has grown, well, smaller and smaller over time. Logistically, figuring out a spot where we could negotiate around it became impossible.

Halloween on the other hand was tempting and the door to the apartment beckoned at first. Living in a high rise building at least has the advantage of a safe indoor public space for display. You do soon learn that to decorate your door implies bounties of candy within and Kim and I realized we weren’t really ready for the rapacious distribution center that a building like ours becomes on Halloween. It also occurs early enough that I am generally still at the office and would fall entirely on Kim.

As for New Jersey, for now, my itinerant lifestyle means I decorate broadly for the season. I planted mums in the front yard and bought some pumpkins – a few “ugly” and one regular. These will give way after Thanksgiving to a wreath, maybe some greens on the railings.

Eventually I hope to go all out for the holidays there and give way to some vintage German decorations for Halloween, perhaps a tasteful black cat or two outside, since it is the House of Seven Cats. Christmas too! I’d love a little tree and I am shopping for the right vintage Santa for the living room. I am sad that my grandmother’s decorations disappeared to the four winds, and occasionally I look for their type on eBay – a certain china Santa, a kind of creche.

All that being said, there isn’t as much festive Halloween decorating here as you might think. However, this card just surfaced on my desk (think of my desk as being like an ocean of stuff where things disappear and are randomly thrown back up for discovery periodically), and sadly I am not sure who thoughtfully sent it to me and Kim. It is a reproduction of a very fine card indeed and even as a reproduction it is fairly old. Thank you!

The poem is hard to read but it says:

A very rare sight on Halloween night
Is a black cat prowling by candle light
If it should be your luck to see –
Long life is yours – prosperity.

Oddly it would appear that this flame, which contains the cat and the clever standing mouse or really rat given his size, is almost like a carrot or turnip, or more likely pumpkin reference – if you consider the green bits growing from the bottom. Maybe a squash as a pumpkin sort of tribute? The greens and jack-o-lanterns are very cheerful and decorative which makes you forget the squash-ness/pumpkin-ness.

The cat rides the witchy broom and the rat rides the cat! This nice black kitty sports a ruff around his or her neck and holds a candle, while this wizard-y rat sits on his haunches with this pointed hat atop his head. Wouldn’t I just love to see that sight on a Halloween night! I mean, who wouldn’t?

As things stand now I will be in Manhattan for Halloween and although I expect to see a lot of dogs in costume (an occupational treat), rats certainly abound here and I even have a black cat (or two, although Beau is in Jersey) so it isn’t quite impossible, now is it?

Speedy

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: At first I wondered, as you may be right now, why this card ended up in my feed, until I realized that the woman perched on the back of this motorcycle is holding a tiny kitten in her lap. He or she, a cute little tabby, is snuggled in on the lap of that nice white dress. Although it may not seem so at first, it is indeed a cat photo.

After a bit of consideration, I realized that this seems to be a celebratory photo. Perhaps it was the purchase of this nice new Indian motorcycle, shiny chrome on the handlebars. (Am I wrong in saying it does not yet have its front light?) The fellow is in a suit and tie with a straw hat, perky but not really motorcycle riding ready. The woman, in her white dress, sporting a pretty locket and kitten perched on the back, is the real point of this though. Her feet off the ground, she is jaunty! Her black stockings and shoes – we can just about see them swinging around the kickstand. They are both grinning. Or could they have just gotten hitched?

This is a photo postcard and like so many, it was never sent, but instead kept in mostly pristine condition.

For all of their jollity, the landscape where they are posed is a bit bereft of charm. There is some sort of industrial tower in the background with a few low wooden buildings and trees off in the distance. Closer in is what appears to be a whet stone on a foot activated stand, some indistinct farm equipment near it, further obscured by what appears to be a thumb print in the chemicals used to print this. On the other side there appears to be a chicken or maybe a goose in the background and a field planted with rows of something.

Somewhere there exists (or did) an early snippet of home movies of my mother’s mom and dad, newlyweds, on an early motorcycle. I think they were either on their honeymoon or it was their honeymoon although I have trouble imagining that they rode that motorcycle from New Jersey to St. Louis where his family lived, which is what I believe they did shortly after being married. (I must try to find someone who knows that story.) Anyway, that would have been a couple of decades after this, although not all that many. My grandfather was an engineer and all things mechanical and in motion were his thing. He repaired outboard motors for extra cash, but just seemed to always be tinkering successfully with things. Frank Wheeling, he died young but I do have adoring memories of him from when I was a tiny tot. My guess is he would have liked this motorcycle. (To find a post about my dad as a young man on his jalopy of a bike go here.)

I myself have only been on a motorcycle a few times as a passenger and I did find it sort of thrilling. This motorcycle seems almost closer to the electric bikes we see today. Kim and I have eyed them with a bit of interest, but I am not sure I see a way that we will end up getting to enjoy one unless someone offers us a ride – I don’t think either of us really has any business trying to drive one solo. But I confess, they are tempting and I although I am ambivalent about driving a car these and various scooters (a neighbor in the city has a pink Vespa!) do appeal.

Peaches

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is an oddball post – I wish to introduce you all to Peaches, the second youngest, female cat of the New Jersey tribe of five. She’s also one of the meanest cats I have ever met. Perhaps considering her story she has some snark coming to her. I will let you decide.

Most readers know that in April of ’23 I inherited a house and five cats from my mother. At her behest, the cats continue to reside here where someone cares for them and the house when I am not here, as Deitch Studio in Manhattan is still our home base. This presents some logistical problems, but fewer than I might have expected when my mother first presented this request, as it became clear that her time was limited.

Shown here with Hobo, our outdoor visitor. They look so much alike! Seems impossible that they are related – Hobo lives too many miles away. But still…

For some background, my mother had briefly whittled her cat family down to something manageable a few years ago when she adopted, first, an all black kitten (Beauregard or Beau) from an agency in Newark, but then followed in rapid succession by two who came to the backdoor (Gus and Stormy) and Peaches whose story I am going to tell today. After the acquisition of Stormy (the youngest) I did request that she stop acquiring cats as it was clear that these were indeed going to end up being my cats.

Our holiday card featuring the whole family (including Hobo) for a quick cat reference.

Unlike the others who, as outlined above, either came through the front door via adoption or showed up repeatedly and starving at the back, Peaches was acquired sight unseen. My mother loved to tell the Peaches acquisition story.

Prized spot in our bedroom. Forbidden territory when the NYC cats are here.

At that time, now about three years ago, my mom had a cousin living with her. They had both grown up in a nearby town called Long Branch and her cousin inherited a house there, but lived with mom for a few years. Word was, back near her house in Long Branch, a friend heard a cat meowing over several days and had called Animal Control to find out what was going on and get the cat.

Seems somehow this cat had gotten away from the mother and the litter and was trapped in a basement after falling down a hole. Poor little thing was starving and crying.

Peaches does play with toys.

My mom knew that it was likely that a feral kitten would ultimately be put down as unadoptable. She called Animal Control in Long Branch as soon as the cat was picked up and told them not to put her down and that she would take it.

I guess the guy said, Lady, you don’t want this cat! It is the meanest cat we’ve ever had to catch. So wild we had to use a broom handle to move the carrier with her in it! And of course mom said she didn’t care and wanted the cat.

She very much enjoys watching the activity on the deck where chipmonks and other critters have been known to roam. Recently I found what I think were groundhog muddy tracks across it so quite a show.

She arrived and was christened Peaches for the woman who had heard her and called Animal Control originally. She entered our house at the time as the youngest and only female cat of the house. To my knowledge no one has ever actually touched Peaches since she came to Oxford Avenue. She hid at first and then slowly assimilated to the extent that she would hang with the pack of cats but keep a wide birth (six or more feet) from any human.

Left to her own devices (which she largely is) she seems quite content.

Over the past several years she has thawed slightly. She now willingly sit in the same room as us, sometimes quite close. When I am feeding them she will come right up to me but if I try to touch her or get too close where she is curled up she will hiss, spit and growl. On this trip however, she “accidentally” jumped up on the arm of my chair and stared me in the eye for several long moments before panic set in and she flew back off. I was as stunned as she was.

Milty and Peaches.

She has one outstanding cat friendship in the house, with Milty, our most senior cat. I will occasionally find them sleeping together. She’ll go over and gently groom him once in a while. It seems like an unlikely pairing, but I am pleased she has a compatriot among the cats.

This just the other day. Happy Peaches.

There have been days this summer when I have caught her rolling and stretching happily. I think she is a contented cat in general, even if her interactions with the human population are limited. I used to joke with my mother that in ten years when Peaches was happily installed on my lap being petted we would look back and remember how we couldn’t get near her. I am less sure of that future, but she’s one of the Butler family cats now to stay.

The Summer Shift

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: The suitcases are largely packed, art supplies for weighing in massively in a Fresh Direct bag – what did we do before Fresh Direct bags? I have moved everything imaginable in them. For those of you who don’t have Fresh Direct, they are super large reusable bags with handles which our food is delivered in. The company will take them back or you can stockpile them for moves to you summer house, move your office and more.

Kim’s bag of art supplies, carefully prepacked.

The cats are looking at us suspiciously. They duly noted that the suitcase after last week’s trip to San Diego never went back down to the basement. Something is clearly afoot! No one has gone near the carriers but we will need to grab them fast in the morning if we don’t want to have to dig them out from under our bed. I will them to become used to this twice a year ritual now but they are resisting it. Cookie will undoubtedly spend the entire vacation under a chair again, hissing at us. (We continue to try to deploy new ways of dealing with it and I will report back on those efforts.)

It looked like so much in NYC and seems like next to nothing here in NJ!

This year things are different than last. I have less vacation time earned at my new job so I will spend more of my time commuting, some remote days and then some vacation at the end. I am reminded of how different work is, having a new job is an adjustment still in month six.

Much of my staff is new and haven’t accrued much vacation and I worry that when the busy season of fall hits we will all get exhausted. We are all still getting used to each other and the team is still emerging and finding itself. We are told our offices will move, maybe as early as October. We are somewhat camped out in our current space (leaks! mice!) so we are looking forward to it, despite the fact it will come at a busy time.

The bounty of cherry tomatoes and a couple of tiny strawberries.

My new commute takes me way over to the East side of Manhattan – handy for a girl who lives on York Avenue most of the year, but adding time onto the commute from New Jersey. I am eyeing the ferry which would leave me on First and 35th just to shoot up to 62nd and York and cuts the trip to 50 minutes. On the other side the commute is a bit longer home and I have to decide if it is worth it. The ferry is, without question, a more pleasant way to travel!

Oh the cucumbers…

I am looking most forward to time in my garden however, and evenings out on the deck. That has become real summer for me. Reports of my cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers come from a friend daily. Cucumbers in particular seem very happy, with their prickly strange nascent bounty – pickle size bits! My cucumbers have grown lavishly and would cheerfully take over the world given time. I gave them small trellises to climb which they covered immediately and kept going. We eat a lot of cucumbers so I am good with this, at least in theory.

First year this dahlia bloomed – was given to me in memory of my mom.

The cherry tomatoes had spit out a few specimens on my last trip but are quite laden now. The larger tomatoes had not yet yielded fruit. The strawberries in their pots appear happy, but a bit slow. Perhaps they too need a trellis and a spot in the yard next year. There is a tiny grapevine which has taken hold and I am hoping that it will winter and return for further growth next year.

This grapevine is rather impressive. Has grown a lot in the few weeks since I was last here.

Mom always had grapes and strawberries growing wild across fences in the backyard growing up – we never harvested them much and they were really there for the wildlife. I take that attitude with my blueberry bushes which are laden with berries and disappear in the twinkling of an eye. These days the birds, bunnies and chipmunks and I are locked in a race to see who gets what. of the other produce I am sorry to say I am less generous than my mother was.

The deck last summer.

Few things restore me better than an evening on my deck with twinkling fairy lights and some music playing. It makes all the effort of moving us there worthwhile. Time slows which these days is magical.

However, as I write this, the front door area in this small apartment is laden with packages and cats are giving us a sideways look. They know! Shortly I will do a final clearing of the fridge and throughout and we will hit the road. With any luck I will send a sign off from the other side!

******

We arrived, relatively without incident. Cash, my favorite car dog friend, was displeased with cats in his car, but he remained at a reasonable distance in the front seat. Just looking at Jeff occasionally and asking Why? (I have written previously about Jeff and Cash here.)

Cash looking at Jeff and asking, Why are these cats in our car?

Cookie and Blackie have disappeared into the house, under something somewhere. B will likely come out when he hears us in the bedroom later, not sure about C. We are trying something different and giving her a room to herself, Kim’s studio, upstairs.

Rainy day here so I only have rainy pictures of the garden. Alas, hoping it clears for us this evening!

Cat Tales

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I have used the term little gem before, but I can’t think of an item it fits better than this one. Within days of purchasing the Neatness award (featured in a post from last week here) the folks at Curiosities Antiques in Texas (@Curiositiesantiques or via their website here) inquired if I would be interested in this little book – and would I!

I have one or two similar period volumes in my collection, at least from the same period and sort of litho images. The one that immediately comes to mind is one I hunted for an ultimately purchased on eBay I think. It is The Cat’s Concert and a 2018 post about it can be found here.

Today’s post is going to attempt to give you the chance to really see this book so many images coming up. I hope I do it justice. Obviously I had to be careful about how I propped the book open in order to take the photos so they are less than perfect, but I would not have been able to scan them which would have required flattening the book.

Inside front cover which peeks through. Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

To start, the peek-a-boo cut-out cover which has kitty peering between the cat tails is the most fragile part of this book, folded almost to pieces from opening; the entire book held together with a ribbon. Kitty is a nice tortie and sports a bow in the same shades and shapes as the reeds decorating the front, very elegant and I assume that the gold and silver of the reeds were shiny in their day. These elements on the cover are embossed, the decorative plants and the cat on the inside page too, the whiskers especially stand out. This little volume was lovingly printed and produced.

Title page. No copyright information but a printing number in the lower left?

Inside it is inscribed on the inside cover, A Merry Christmas , Dec. 25th 1893. To: Miss Lola Ritter, With Best Wishes, Lizzie. This decorating the cat part of the inner cover.

The contents are poems, cat verse. They are original works by Edward Oxenford. This little book was printed in Germany and published and printed by the Art Lithographic Publishing Company, Munich, German and New York, USA. Edward Oxenford has a few other available titles to his credit I could find, one book called Sports and Play which is a similarly litho edition to Cat Tales, but cut out in the shape of a saddle. (Apologies for not providing an image but there’s only one online and it wasn’t willing to be grabbed. An odd looking volume though.) As for the publisher, this sort of novelty book seems to have been their meat and potatoes, although I did not find any real history about it. Seems like they may have produced postcards as well.

The other book of his is called Holy Gladness and it also sports beautiful lithographs but unlike the other two books, it is a larger bound edition. Neither of the other books are widely available and Cat Tales seems somewhat rare as well. Edward shares a name with a much earlier writer who also went under the name of Edward de Vere and has much more writing and controversy to his credit.

This illustrator gets a credit at least! Not in the Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

I’m a bit surprised (and sad) that the artist of these illustrations isn’t identified and get credit. These are wonderful illustrations beyond having been beautifully printed. There is no copyright date, only the inscription on the front identifies the year.

I’d like to point out that there is a Miss Blackie’s Yarn below. My Mr. Blackie is decidedly unimpressed by these so called Christmas verses at the close of this book. Oddly all three of these poems seem to end badly for the cats in question. Not at all sure I approve either. A jolly volume, these last few verses notwithstanding.

Goodbye to Earth

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: Today’s card wandered in via eBay. It belongs to a series of such images made by various studios and photographers contemporaneously including a favorite I own and blogged about previously here and here. What is it about kittens drifting along in the sky that proves so irresistible? This pair looks remarkably unconcerned about their voyage.

This rather identical pair sit in a small basket which is almost entirely obscured by the darkness at the bottom of the photo. I can’t imagine they packed many provisions for a trip all the way to the moon. Such small fellows, can’t expect them to plan well I guess. It is a benign looking (paper?) moon they are heading toward, smiling kindly, so I am sure it will be fine.

Is it a coincidence that these kittens look pretty much identical to today’s pusses? Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

A close look reveals that the “balloon” is actually a small ball (label almost visible on the right) covered in a small fish next and with a string on top to produce the clever effect of a floating balloon. At the bottom it says Goodbye to Earth and the maker, Rotary Photo, E.C. is noted. On the left it is blurry where the photo was laid down to be reshot for the card but it says something A.

I have probably written about Rotary which back in its day was a bonanza producer of such cards and one could devote oneself to a collection made up solely of cute cat cards produced by these folks – I don’t seem to have ended up owning many however. I sometimes imagine a studio with kittens in various stages of growth bounding around. I don’t want to know what happed to the grown kitties – bet there was nary a mouse around there though!

On the back of this card it notes that it was Printed in England. It was never mailed. In the ten years I have been producing Pictorama posts (yep, we are hard on an actual 10 year anniversary as it believe it was July of ’14 – yay Pictorama!) I think this is the first time I have encountered an item that seemed to have a message for me. For whatever reason I had not read it before purchasing the card.

The German version I posted about back in 2014. Link above for post. Pams-Pictorama.com Collection.

Some folks know that I have been in the midst of some ongoing, and at times extremely painful, oral surgery. Among other things it has kept me from running and in general has pretty much made me remarkably miserable. However, as we head into this summer holiday week I especially enjoyed the message in a neat script penned on the back – no note who it is to or from – This so all our cares for a week or so more, and our return will be much like a fall would be to the “pussies”. A safe July 4 week landing to all!