Caturday felid trifecta: Oldest American picture book is about cats, de-stressing with kittens, and scientific proof that cats can recognize their names

Reader Thomas told me about a post at Literary Hub describing the oldest American “picture book” still in print, Millions of Cats, published in 1928.

The writer and artist was an unusual polymath, Wanda Gág (1893-1946) described by Literary Hub like this:

For the uninitiated, Gág was a celebrated artist and lithographer in the Greenwich Village-centric Modernist art scene in the 1920s, a free-thinking, sex-positive leftist who also designed her own clothes and translated fairy tales. When Gág was just 15, her artist father died of tuberculosis, and his last words to his daughter were: “What Papa couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish.”

I don’t know if art is every really finished, but Gág certainly continued his work, becoming a prominent artist and illustrator. Then, in 1928, Gág published her first book, Millions of Cats, which was adapted from a story she had made up to entertain her friends’ children. Written and illustrated by Gág, it also featured hand-lettered text (created by her brother) and something brand new for picture books: the illustrated double-page spread.

Examples from the book:

I think Carl Sagan got some inspiration from the page above. MILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF CATS!

More—the plot from Wikipedia:

The hand-lettered text, done by the author’s brother, tells the story of an elderly couple who realize that they are very lonely. The wife wants a cat to love, so her husband sets off in search of a beautiful one to bring home to her. After traveling far away from home, he finds a hillside covered in “Cats here, cats there, Cats and kittens everywhere. Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats…” This rhythmic phrase is repeated several other times throughout the story.

The man wants to bring home the most beautiful of all the cats, but he is unable to decide. Each seems lovely, so he walks back home with all of the cats following him. His wife is dismayed when he arrives, realizing immediately what her husband overlooked: they won’t be able to feed and care for billions and trillions of cats. The wife suggests letting the cats decide which one should stay with them, asking “Which one of you is the prettiest?” This question incites an enormous cat fight, frightening the old man and woman, who run back into the house.

Soon, all is quiet outside. When they venture out, there is no sign of the cats: they’d apparently eaten each other up in their jealous fury. Then, the old man notices one skinny cat hiding in a patch of tall grass. It had survived because it didn’t consider itself pretty, so the other cats hadn’t attacked it. The couple take the cat into their home, feed it and bathe it, watching it grow sleek and beautiful as the days pass: exactly the kind of cat they wanted.

That’s a rather gruesome ending, but children’s books used to be much darker than they are today. Millions of Cats won a Newbery Honor award in 1929. Here’s Gág at the easel with a kitty nearby:

She was a feminist, and Wikipedia describes that aspect of her persona in this way:

In 1927 her article These Modern Women: A Hotbed of Feminists was published in The Nation, drawing the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and prompting the publisher and designer Egmont Arens to write: “The way you solved that problem (her relationship with men) seems to me to be the most illuminating part of your career. You have done what all the other ‘modern women’ are still talking about.”

I couldn’t find that essay online, but if any readers can, please post the link below.

************

I may have posted this before, or a video that’s similar, but I can’t stress too often the de-stressing powers not just of cats, but also of kittens. Here, see for yourself:

************

Nature Scientific Reports has a new paper on whether cats recognize their names (click on screenshot for free access):
Now of course it’s dubious whether cats can even grasp the concept of having a personal name, but what they can do is discriminate their name (which they hear frequently in association with good stuff like food and fusses) from other nouns that they don’t hear in such connection. Saito et al. did their studies in both house-dwelling cats and cats in cat cafes. Here’s a bit of the abstract:

Among cats from ordinary households, cats habituated to the serial presentation of four different general nouns or four names of cohabiting cats showed a significant rebound in response to the subsequent presentation of their own names; these cats discriminated their own names from general nouns even when unfamiliar persons uttered them. These results indicate that cats are able to discriminate their own names from other words. There was no difference in discrimination of their own names from general nouns between cats from the cat café and household cats, but café cats did not discriminate their own names from other cohabiting cats’ names. We conclude that cats can discriminate the content of human utterances based on phonemic differences.

Even that excerpt is a bit misleading—or at least the press about it is—because if you called a cat, say, “Underpants” as its habitual name, it would answer to that rather than to an unfamiliar word like “Fluffy”. (The use of the term “their own name” is slightly misleading!) What the research really shows is that, as the last sentence indicates, cats can tell differences between different sounds made by humans, and they respond more eagerly to the sound that corresponds to their names. But did anyone doubt that?

But for those who want visual confirmation, here’s a video showing the phenomenon. It’s SCIENCE, folks! (Of course the video is but one anecdote, but read the paper for the science.)