Here’s a random fact I stumbled upon recently: Recycle Bookstore West in Campbell, Calif., has a store cat named Isbn. Yes, Isbn, as in ISBN. How clever is that?? Without a doubt, this is the best name for a bookstore cat that I’ve come across as yet in my many years of bookstore travels.
The photo of Isbn below is one that appears (along with some very favorable reviews!) on Yelp, but others can also be found in the Flickr accounts of Klara Kim and meowhous.
A year ago I blogged about Veruca, the tortoise that makes his home at Rivendell Books in Montpelier, Vt., and who also happens to sport a great book-related name. Have you had or known a pet with a great bookish name? If so please immortalize them here and (in so doing) offer inspiration to other book-loving would-be pet owners.
Sounds like my cat’s name – Cat.
Michael is a sleepy guinea pig.
My first cat was named Gus, after Augustus the Cat in P.G. Wodehouse. By the time I had my bookstore, the cat I had was named Beaker (size 3 head, size 7 nose) and although he was a dear cat he wasn’t too bright (size 1 brain) and I couldn’t trust him not to zip out the door into the street, but he was hit at the local nursing home.
I knew a lady with two dogs named Bilbo and Pippen from Lord of the Rings.
omigosh, spelling error! Kristin Clark Venuti.
A character whose last name is Isbn appears as one of many “inside publishing” jokes in the forthcoming middle-reader book, Leaving the Bellwethers. It’s a caper novel about a lighthouse-dwelling family by Kristin Clark Ventuni.
A club for musicians in Chicago named its cat ClawThePussy.
Yeah! Isbn is a great cat and does a fantastic job in the store. Lots of fans come in to tell us how much they love him.
I had cats named Orlando (after Woolf) and Eliot. My new kitten’s name is Thoby (after Woolf’s brother)
I had an all white cat named Hemingway who used to help me check proofs on the reference books I was publishing at the time. Now I have a Caruso and a Fellini. One of my artist friends had a pair of finches named Franny and Zoey, and then moved on to cats named Magic and Marker (after the finches were gone).
My roommate and I had a cat named Mephistopheles (I was thinking T.S. Eliot, but Mephie was more often Faustian in nature). He was a great Maine coon cat, and he loved to take cat naps with me. Sadly, he passed last year.
I had an orange cat named Orlando, after Kathleen Hale’s Orlando!
I have a cat named Prunesquallor, the last names of a brother-sister pair in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.
This is the bookstore where my husband proposed to me! Well, before it was remodeled. I’ve seen that cat quite a few times.
Our boys had a guinea pig they named Winnie-the-Pig.
I have a cat named Grimoire. Although he’s less of a witch’s book of spells and more like a cat that ATE a witch’s book of spells…
My husband and I had a cat named The Great Catsby
Our bookshop dog (who has been my dog for 14 years, 9 years longer than there has been a bookstore to inhabit) is named Seymour, after Salinger’s Seymour Glass, who was quite the eccentric. (Seymour the bookshop dog is half Basset Hound, half Siberian Husky.) Trivia: I almost named the store Seymour Books.
Okay, it’s not a real live pet, but our Deer Run Branch has a concrete deer outside that they dress for holidays and seasons….his name is Booker.
At the second location of The Book Barn in Niantic, CT there is a Guinea Pig named Paige.
Last fall we found a small cat who had been dumped in the parking lot of our public library. She was about 7 or 8 months old then. She turned out to be a spunky little thing so we named her Scout!!!
I once had a Chinese Sharpei. We named him Little Bo Pei, as in Little Bo Peep, Bo Schembechler and Sharpei!
My neighbor has a cat named Walt Whitman. And of course, there was Dewey Readmore Books who lived for nineteen years at the public library in Spencer, Iowa. About a year ago, there was a book published about him. How much more bookish can you get?
I had a dog named Winnie the Pooch…
Hello, kitty. Veruca has great cattitude.
Last year, after first meeting my puppy I asked on my blog for name suggestions, “…ideally literary and fey.” Got many terrific ones. Since I can’t give the link, it was on June 6, 2008 for anyone interested in seeing them.