We know kitties like walking across books, but did a cat help decorate the binding on these books?
This barely believable caption, and others, can be found in: Popular electricity magazine in plain English v. 6 May 1913-Apr. 1914
What’s this knitting kitty plotting?! All will be revealed tomorrow; stay tuned!
Looks like something’s afoot a-paw at the Freer|Sackler
Conrad Gesner was a renowned Swiss naturalist whose Historiae animalium is possibly the seminal work of zoology. So obviously he had to include the common cat!
Cats are critical to posters, apparently. A smattering of kitties appear in Posters, a critical study of the development of poster design in continental Europe, England and America by Charles Matlack Price.
Price obviously knew the importance of cats in art. He certainly had strong feelings about the topic of art, going so far as to include the quote above from Robert Louis Stevenson as the epigraph to the book. And since we see 2 kitties gracing the title page, we can deduce that his idea of good art = cats. But I’m no art historian.
The many cats of illustrator Benjamin Rabier. You may already be familiar with his work. He illustrated The Laughing Cow, aka La Vache Qui Rit, which you’ve probably seen in the dairy aisle of your local supermarket.
We have many of Rabier’s children’s books in our digital library, including three we’ve borrowed from here, Alphabet, Les animaux s'amusent, and Scènes comique dan la forêt. Not used are Les animaux en liberté, Scènes de la vie privée des animaux, and Les petites misères de la vie des animaux.
The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, now known as the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, held an exhibit in the ‘40s about the cat in history and art. Nine Lives, its exhibit catalog, is available in our collection of digitized books, and was used as a reference in the Wikipedia article on the cultural depiction of cats.
If you’re curious, the Smithsonian Collections Search can point you to over 100 objects in the Cooper Hewitt about cats.
Here, I brought you this. #kitties
from Gefahrvolle Fahrten: Kolonialerzählung aus Deutsch-Ostafrika (1909)
(Source: library.si.edu)
A little leftover from Halloween - is all your candy gone by now?
Happy Friday everyone.
Source: Die entwicklung der modernen buchkunst in Deutschland
Cats are known familiars of witches and/or librarians. Spooky, right?
But we can’t help think of all the kittehs in black who are waiting for loving homes. Go adopt.
Cat break! Glasses-wearing Skifcha, who stars in arty short films, we love him.
(via The Films of Skifcha, The Russian Cat Who Wears Paper Eyeglasses)
(via walkerartcenter)
