Rags the Rotography Cat

A Basket Full of Baby

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: This little fellow wandered into the house via one of the postcard shows. It seems properly autumnal for today, which for future readers I will note is November 1 and Marathon Day here in New York City. (It looks like a prime day for it at 41 degrees, sunny and less windy than it has been.) It is also the day after Halloween and the day the clocks roll back so a sort of busy weekend here in Manhattan. The yellow fall light is putting us in the harvest moon and speaking of that we have enjoyed a few enormous moons, one which was also a glorious red.

I can’t be absolutely sure, but I believe this little fellow is Rags, aka The Famous Rotography Cat. (An earlier post on him can be read here and another recent post with him here.) Here he looks young and somewhat kittenish, adolescent maybe, and like perhaps he had a long day of posing and is about to put his nose down and do some serious sleeping. So much for hard work that day.

In addition to Rags, I always think that the Rotograph photo studios must have had a constant, roiling pack of kittens churning through the studio for photos, although Rags was a constant star and ruled the roost into adulthood. (I just found that there is a children’s book dedicated to him and using Rotograph photos as illustrations.) I do hope all the little ones found good homes if they were no longer tiny and less useful to the photographers.

The basket here is one that could hold any kind of fruit but this time of year my mind turns to apples. Although our modern world makes apples available to us year-round (in reality they have always stored well in a cool place), there is nothing like the apples of fall here in the New York area.

I worked with someone at Jazz, Wynton’s former assistant Edith, who was a sort of apple expert and connoisseur. Evidently, she had deep knowledge of all the different kinds; we only discussed it once or twice. Although I am somewhat flexible, I have a deep affection and preference for Macintosh apples which sadly have fallen out of favor. For me their level of tartness and texture is just right, however I gather that being slightly softer they are harder to ship and therefore less desirable. Also, being open to certain fungus they are also unlikely to be organic.

I have toyed with planting a Macintosh apple tree in the yard in New Jersey. The winters are a bit hard for them I gather and I have not mastered the burlap wrap for the winter which I would need to. Meanwhile, I would plant in the late spring, hopefully in a sunny spot. Three to five years for first real crop. Worth thinking about.

A particular favorite leaf from Kim this week.

Having said that (and digressed considerably), this basket could just as easily have contained peaches or pears or other things. There is a bit of wire (I would worry about that with the kitty) sticking up which actually gives the card a little more visual interest. The Rotograph copyright is just on the lower left of the basket and in script, A basket full. With the black table on a black background, it is all velvety dark and the surface of the card is mat, contributing further to this effect.

Unfortunately, this attractive effect also makes the written note at the bottom near to impossible to make out. It appears to say, From, baby Sleep (?) To Baby Bartes. It was mailed from Schenectady, New York on April 26, 1907 at 9 AM. It was sent to Carrie Bartes, West Berne, alt bo (?) NY. At the bottom it also says, c/o Mrs. Bartes. It was received in West Berne on April 27 with no time stamp. I don’t know what the alt bo referred to and instead of Miss it reads Mip – which a bit of research shows was either the way a double “s” could be written in script or, perhaps as a result, a title occasionally recognized as Mip replacing Miss on early marriage certificates etc. (This is really my fact for the day – I had no idea.)

In my postcard posts I feel like people often select an image of a cat and assign it to a pet they were visiting. Occasionally it is an actual picture of said real cat (obviously usually sent by the owner), but sometimes like this it is just a reference and you wonder if Baby actually looked like this or is it just generically cat. Also, the practice of sending postcards to children is very sweet and was a thing. I always imagine how much they must have enjoyed getting them and perhaps that is why they were preserved, tucked away over time. (Although there are clues that perhaps our Miss Carrie Bartes is still too tiny a tot to appreciate this when recieved.) Meanwhile, yes, postcards were sort of the cat videos of their day, being shared with friends and family.

The beginning of November marks the race to the end of the year – always a busy time for fundraisers. However, I have some excellent bits to share over the coming weeks so let the season begin.

On the Fence

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: I have seen this postcard before and I cannot say why but have never thought to purchased it until now. Suddenly it just struck me as good fun when I saw it the other day online, a perfect version of a sort of a card. Perhaps all my kitten photo posts lately had me in a different frame of mind and attuned me to seeing it better.

Meanwhile, it’s an overcast morning here in Manhattan and shortly after I finish this post I need to hurry down to 76th Street and Second Avenue for a street fair where the animal hospital I work for has taken a block for our annual Paw Day. I will layer up with branded t-shirt, sweatshirt, baseball cap and kerchief – we actually give those to dogs who visit but I like to wear one jauntily tied around my neck. I don’t know about sun, but I think maybe we can avoid rain.

Anyway, today’s card shows these two adolescent cats, just out of proper kittenhood in my opinion, sitting on a picket fence distracted perfectly in unison by something we cannot see. Their uniform, spotty fur makes me thing they might be littermates. Utterly illegible, in poorly planned white writing on the white fence it declares these two as, The Astronomers. These are stargazing felines it seems. The background is a solid black so if there are stars in theory, they reside out of view.

Perhaps ironically, or not, the copyright by Rotograph is a more visible white on black, under the leg of the left cat, right where his black tail is curled around his feet or her feet. The copyright is 1906 by the Rotograph Company of New York. (Almost exactly a year ago I did another post about a Rotograph card which can be found here. However, more about the Rotograph Company and Rags their cat, can be found in a post here. Oddly that one is from April of ’19. Spring is Rotograph time here at Pictorama!) It would appear to me, for the record, that the cat on the left is indeed Rags as he has a singular mark coming down from his right eye.)

Pams-Pictorama.com collection.

This card was mailed in the year of its copyright, December 1, 1906. It was sent from and to Worcester, Massachusetts at 4:00 in the afternoon. It was mailed to, Master Topsy & Sweetheart Merrit, 6 High Street, Worcester, Mass. (Out of curiosity I checked and there is a split-level home of relatively recent vintage there now.) I’m sure it was great enjoyed by Topsy and Sweetheart and as a result has somehow lasted in splendid shape all these years.

I pledge for a longer post tomorrow when I am not under the gun to get to work. I will catch you all up on tales (and tails) from Paw Day perhaps.

Rags

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Pam’s Pictorama Photo Post: As I mentioned yesterday, the scanner here at Deitch Studio has made a permanent exit. It didn’t really owe us much as it was acquired in 2007 according to our Amazon records and survived a couple of Deitch publications in their entirety – of course not just the finished products requiring huge files of high resolution scans, but the many stages of sketches, not to mention this blog and the daily demands made of any scanner. It died halfway through a scan of the back cover of Kim’s next book, almost but not quite making that final last gasp. RIP old friend.

Mr. Deitch’s requirements of size and resolution make replacing this piece of equipment a somewhat more complex matter than it would appear – as I understand it, the model we currently have (a direct descendent of the only kind we have ever owned) was designed for things like scanning x-rays than with cartoonists necessarily in mind. The scanner in question is no longer produced (of course!) but as I am in charge of technology here at Deitch Studio I have taken it under advisement and I am researching a replacement.

Meanwhile today, I present a recent acquisition via the photo the seller supplied. Rags, the Famous Rotograph Cat turns out to have been a hard working little fellow. From kittenhood he was dressed up and posed – in tiny men’s suits, baby clothes, a dunce cap and the like, or in juxtaposition with baby chicks, bunnies or other small animals that a cat like Rags was perhaps more interested in snacking on. Looking at this scrappy little tabby fellow, I have to assume that while he would have preferred a life of leisure, however despite certain indignities, his days as a photo model, (hopefully) complete with meals and a warm, dry place to live was preferable to what many of his cohorts could opt into.

From the accounts I can find of the Rotograph Company, it would appear that Rags was a fellow resident of Manhattan. Situated at 684 Broadway from 1904-1911, the Rotograph Company inhabited a handsome building near Fourth Street which, according to Google Earth photos, appears largely intact from that period today. For some reason Kim and I both got Rotograph and Rotography all mixed up with photogravure (a photo intalglio print making process) and instead it appears these folks just made this name up. In fact their line of photo postcards were indeed real photos (as per a tiny printed boast on the back bottom of the card) either produced directly for sale or made as commercial items for others. During their brief existence they coughed out more than 6,000 cards, many which are actively resold today. This particular card was mailed from Niagara Falls, NY on the afternoon of July 30, 1907 and arrived in North Sterling, Ohio on August 1 at 6 AM.

When I reflect on working animals I tend to think that dogs (at least many of them) enjoy having a job. It seems to me that a dog in films is having a glorious time of being put through his or her paces with a master or mistress lurking just behind the camera, rewards in hand. It is the same instinct that makes them herd sheep well. They like to hang out with the humans and be a part of something. It is difficult to imagine cats as anything but more diffident to such a role. However from what I read, evidently with enough of the right cat treats many cats are willing to sing for their supper as well and do so in films and performance venues. The question of if they enjoy it hangs unanswered. While I occasionally remind Cookie and Blackie that they have “jobs” this usually means curling up on the bed with me when I am under the weather or allowing me to pick them up and “kiss their little cat face” – which they hate of course, but it is after all, work.

On Instagram I follow a heavy set tabby with the moniker Larry the Security Cat who is a rescue living in a thriftstore called BLUvintage in Delaware. I only recently realized he has a broken paw which has healed quite crooked and is evidence that he had a rough early life on the street. It would appear that his duties these days are light – largely confined to pets, chin rubs and posing with strangers. He posts frequently and has over 7,200 followers. I found him via a mention in the New York Times. It seems like the right amount of genteel work for this fellow and a good trade-off to end a hard life on the street.

Meanwhile, our friend Rags appears to have gone onto star in his own book, Kittens and Cats in 1911. It is my hope the residuals were enough for him to retire on at that point.

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Cookie, posing in her best Rags imitation yesterday, and on Blackie’s cushion, which she stole.

 

Today a shout out to fellow feline blogger Historical Felines for their post on Rags which helped inform today’s post and can be found in its entirety at Aristocat!