The Cat MEGAPACK ®. Andrew Lang
moon,
Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,
Yelling the Garden of Pluto’s red rune.
Tall towers and pyramids ivy’d and crumbling,
Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber’d streets;
Bleak Arkham bridges o’er rivers whose rumbling
Joins with no voice as the thick horde retreats.
Belfries that buckle against the moon totter,
Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac’d,
And living to answer the wind and the water,
Only the lean cats that howl in the wastes.
THE HEMINGWAY KITTENS, by A. R. Morlan
Some people may say that cats and bookstores don’t mix, that small beasts with claws and the occasional ability to spray have no place among shelved books which reach from the floor to near-ceiling…but answer me, is there anything more appealing than the sight of a cat curled up next to an opened book? With its softly-pointed chin resting on the creamy-white printed pages?
True, initially I began shutting cats up inside my bookstore to take care of a minor mouse problem before it became a multiple mice problem, but after the first time I approached the store minutes before opening time, and saw that small crowd of people standing before the shop’s display window, cooing and oohing over the sight of Chatty and Muffin curled up into tiger-and-white commas next to the shiny-covered copies of the latest Stephen King novel, I realized that I was on to something. I hadn’t seen people react like that since I’d last been in New York City during the winter holidays, when Macy’s set up its annual Christmas window displays—and that had been the year they’d done the Little Women scenes, back in 1979.
The connection with the name of the store didn’t hurt, either—Barrett and Browning’s did have that “couples” connotation, and the fact that Chatty was a she and Muffin was a he (even if he was smaller than she was) only seemed to enhance the store’s image. Pretty soon, customers started asking where “Barrett and Browning” were, and if I could coax those two sleepy felines out among the shelves during regular store hours, it usually meant a few extra dollars in the till, especially those small—but expensive—items like bookmarks or protective covers for paperback books…all of which I managed to order in cat designs.
Long after the mouse problem was solved, I still kept cats in my shop. Luckily, Muffin wasn’t a sprayer, and neither he nor Chatty was wont to rend their claws along the exposed spines of the shelved books (both the new ones I kept out front, and the used section toward the back of the narrow rectangle of a half-store), so as long as their litter pans were scooped clean, and their bowls of food and water were kept full, my two feline salespeople did their jobs well…so well, in fact, that within a couple of years, I found that I needed help in the store. Initially, Barrett and Browning was little more than a hobby for me; after my husband passed away, I’d leased the building with my insurance money, knowing full well that I’d never really be able to compete with the “big guys”—the chain outlets with their coffee stands on the side, and plug-ins for computers, and couches, and tee-shirt-cap-coffee-mug concession aisles—but I was content with being a niche market, one where a person might be able to find just the right book, at maybe not-quite-the-right price, but nonetheless it would be the right book, right in their neighborhood.
Muffin and Chatty were both getting on in years when I hired Rik (no “c” between the “i” and the “k”), to the point where he’d have to go hunting among the back shelves for them whenever a customer demanded to see “Barrett and Browning,” then carry them up front. He never seemed to mind, even after that time when one of Chatty’s claws got caught in one of the half a dozen earrings Rik wore and he almost lost the earring and a good chunk of the right earlobe. At the time, he was fresh out of high school, and working afternoons while taking morning and evening classes at the University over in St. Paul. I didn’t know what he was majoring in (aside from getting holes punched in his ears, and bleaching the top layer of his usually brown hair a sort of sickly orange), but he was good with the customers, and even better with the cats, so I considered him to be a good “hire.”
And he understood how to best arrange the books—especially the used ones—so as to make them more enticing for the customers. None of that orderly, library-like themed progression of books sorted by author, subject and so on…he understood that much of the fun of searching for a book was exactly that—the search. What he did do with the rows of used, slightly tattered volumes was to arrange them by color—black spines segued into deep blues and purples, which merged with the greens, then the garish yellows (usually reserved for self-help tomes), before dipping into the sunset hues. That way, the mix of paperback and hardcovers seemed to flow naturally before the eye, thus encouraging the browser to really hunker down and study each book, each row, then each shelf. And the longer one looks, the more one sees…and, it can be hoped, buys.
Rik also knew how to create cozy spots on each shelf for the cats—deliberately bare spots where a feline could curl up, or stretch out, without the fear of knocking books off the shelf itself. And it was at his urging that I began to add cat artwork to the store per se—a framed reproduction of Charles Wysocki’s “Frederick the Literate” with that lovely sleeping tabby draped around dozens of cat-themed books and bird knick-knacks, plus sets of nesting cats, and a sweet-faced white and gray cat pencil holder next to the cash register.
By the time Chatty and Muffin had gone on to the ever-full bowls of milk and eternally clean litter-boxes of feline heaven, Rik had brought me their replacements…Oscar and April, a pair of strays from a local downtown shelter. At first, their gray striped fur and white feet-and-faces contrasted oddly with the warm browns and beiges of the shop’s interior, but Rik (who himself was now sporting streaks of stark white in his straight dark hair) came to my visual rescue once again—telling me, “Once you see what these two do, you’ll understand,” he replaced the sun-stippled brown-into-bone swatch of material I’d had resting along the bottom of the window display with a brightly hand-dyed piece of canvas, adorned with an ombré of reds, pinks and corals. And sure enough, by the next morning, Barrett and Browning’s window had attracted another small crowd—Oscar and April were lovebirds of a feline variety, and when she wasn’t tucking her wedge-shaped face under his chin, he was licking the top of her head.
The only problem was, Oscar and April were so utterly devoted to each other, they failed to notice when a few mice got into the store during a particularly blustery February storm…it wasn’t until the mice had found an unopened box of used books I’d taken in trade the week before that I realized that love didn’t conquer all…especially when it came to getting rid of mice.
“They have to go,” I told Rik, when I confronted him with the remains of what had been several vintage 1950’s Robert Heinlein paperbacks, now gnawed and chewed and clawed into fluffy mice mattresses. “I realize that Oscar and April are adorable, but I don’t think either of them would know what to do with a mouse if it came up and blew a juicy raspberry in their muzzles.”
“That I’d like to see,” Rik laughed, until he took a good look at my expression, and became serious…or at least as serious as someone sporting three hoops per ear can look. “But the customers really do like them…couldn’t we set traps? One of those no-kill—”
“And let the customers see that? Once word gets out that a bookstore has a rodent problem, there go the customers to the Big Guys. And I’m sure they sell mouse motels emblazoned with their logo—”
“No, I think that’s the coffee guys,” Rik smiled, before glancing over at the display window, where our resident Garfields were washing each other’s faces, their combined purrs loud enough to be easily heard by Rik and me as we stood by the cash register ten feet away.
True, they were a wonderful couple—April was a little over half of Oscar’s size, and their markings were almost identical, even though he was several years her senior. You couldn’t imagine a better-suited pair of cats…although I could picture just about any other cats in the world doing a better