Library Cats: The Long Tradition of Felines on the Public Payroll

In September 1868, a mid-level manager at the London Money Order Office wrote to his boss asking for money to buy cats. The mice were eating the paperwork. Three cats were hired on probation at one shilling a week between them, and they were given six months to prove they were worth the money. They kept the job. That memo is the oldest clean paper trail for a habit that public institutions have never really abandoned, and library cats are its most visible modern form: an animal that lives in a public building, appears in the minutes of council meetings, and occasionally has a job title.

What follows is the record. Names, dates, wages in pre-decimal currency, one municipal eviction vote, and a Russian cat who could not legally start work without a passport.

Table of Contents

• The 1868 Shilling That Put Cats on a Public Payroll
• The Hermitage Had Been Doing It Since 1745
• How Library Cats Became a Recognized Job
• Library Cats Outside the United States
• When Library Cats Go to a Vote
• What a Library Cat Is Actually For
• Frequently Asked Questions

The 1868 Shilling That Put Cats on a Public Payroll

The British Post Office is where the paperwork starts. Frederic Rowland Jackson, Controller of the London Money Order Office, put the proposal to John Tilley, Secretary of the Post Office: add cats to the establishment. Three cats went on probation in September 1868 with an allowance of one shilling a week, and the terms were blunt. Reduce the mouse problem within six months or the allowance stops.

They did their duty very efficiently, in the language of the file, and by 1873 the allowance had gone up to one shilling and sixpence and cats had spread to other offices. This was not sentiment. It was a line item, reviewed and increased on performance.

Tibs the Great, 23 Pounds of Civil Servant

The most famous of them was Tibs, born in November 1950 at the General Post Office headquarters in St Martin’s Le Grand, London. He inherited the post from his mother Minnie. His wage was two shillings and sixpence a week, he was looked after by a GPO cleaner named Alf Talbut, and he kept the headquarters completely free of mice for fourteen years.

He weighed 23 pounds when he died in December 1964, which the Post Office attributed not to a diet of mice but to his habit of working the staff dining rooms. He got newspaper obituaries: a cat on a public wage, with a named handler and a documented performance record, in 1964.

Why the Job Vanished in 1984

Blackie, the last Post Office headquarters cat, died in 1984. The timing is not a coincidence and it is not a story about budget cuts. Cloth mail sacks were being replaced with rodent-resistant plastic ones. Once the mice could not chew their way into the post, the economic case for the cat collapsed. The role did not get abolished by a committee. It got made redundant by a material.

The Hermitage Had Been Doing It Since 1745

Britain was late. In 1745 Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, ordered cats brought to the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to deal with rats. The city of Kazan in Tatarstan, which had a reputation for producing exceptional mousers, supplied them. That order has effectively never been cancelled.

The State Hermitage Museum now keeps roughly seventy cats in the cellars beneath one of the largest art collections on earth. Three staff members work as their caretakers, and the museum assigns a press secretary to the cats, which is more media representation than most junior curators get. They are not exhibits and not pets in the ordinary sense. They are infrastructure, protecting canvases and wooden frames in a building where the alternative is poison near priceless paint.

How Library Cats Became a Recognized Job

The library version of this arrangement got its origin story in January 1988, when staff at the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa opened the outside book drop and found an eight-week-old kitten that had been pushed through it overnight. A public naming contest called “Name the Kitty” produced Dewey, after Melvil Dewey and his classification system. Staff added the rest: Readmore Books.

He lived in that library for nineteen years and died on 29 November 2006. He accumulated pen pals in England, Canada, South Africa, Belgium and France, and appeared in Cat Fancy and Country Magazine. In 2008 the librarian who found him, Vicki Myron, published Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, which turned a municipal mouser into an international bestseller.

The organizing came before the fame. In 1987, a Minnesota librarian named Phyllis Lahti founded the Library Cat Society to encourage the establishment and recognition of library cats, and to argue for what she called a feline literary presence. Six dollars a year bought you the Library Cat Newsletter, which tracked the careers of cats in libraries across the country. The society wound down in the late 1990s, but by then the documentary maker Gary Roma had spent three years on the subject and cataloged more than 800 library cats worldwide. His 1997 film Puss in Books: Adventures of the Library Cat is still the closest thing the field has to a primary survey.

The other canonical pair arrived earlier and by accident. In 1983 a Scottish Fold turned up at the Douglas County Public Library in Minden, Nevada and slept in a Baker & Taylor shipping box, so the staff named him Baker. Taylor arrived two months later, supplied by the distributor itself. In 1988 the company made them its official mascots and put them on posters, bags and mugs. Librarians who never met either animal carried their faces around on tote bags for decades.

Library Cats Outside the United States

The American examples dominate the coverage because someone wrote the books. The practice is older and wider.

Kuzya, the Cat Who Needed a Passport

In the autumn of 2012 a stray appeared at a children’s library in Novorossiysk, on the Russian Black Sea coast. In 2013 he was promoted from pet to assistant librarian. Installing him legally took real bureaucracy: to be kept in a public building he needed a cat passport, a microchip, and a rabies vaccination. Kuzya is the clearest case of the modern arrangement, where the cat is not a mouser but a documented member of staff who exists to make a public room feel like somewhere a child wants to sit.

Campus Cats With Staff Cards

British universities have produced a small population of semi-official library cats. Bertie works the Hallward Library at the University of Nottingham. Jasper, three-legged, is a Cambridge regular. At the University of Essex, a cat called Pebbles was issued an official student identity card under the name Campus Cat, which is the sort of decision an administration makes once and then defends forever.

The most literary of them is Edinburgh. The resident cat of Edinburgh University Library, a tabby named Jordan, became the basis for Alex Howard’s Library Cat: The Observations of a Thinking Cat, published in April 2016 while Howard was finishing a PhD in English literature. It won the People’s Book Prize in 2017 and has been translated into French, Korean and Italian. Elsewhere, a cat named Pep is a fixture at the University of Regensburg library in Germany, and Texas A&M gave its library cat Miko the title Pest Control Specialist, which is at least honest about the original job description.

Japan applied the same logic to transport with far more commitment. In 2007 a calico named Tama was appointed stationmaster of Kishi Station on the Wakayama Electric Railway, a line close to closure. She was promoted to executive officer in 2009, senior executive officer in 2011, and assistant company president in 2013. Tourists came for the cat and the line survived. If you want to understand why a small town fights to keep a library cat, look at the Kishi timetable.

When Library Cats Go to a Vote

Because these animals live in public buildings, they are subject to public procedure, which is where it gets genuinely strange. On 14 June 2016 the city council of White Settlement, Texas voted 2 to 1 to give the White Settlement Public Library thirty days to rehome Browser, a cat who had lived there for about six years. Councilman Elzie Clements, who voted to evict, said city hall and city businesses are no place for animals.

Mayor Ron White, who opposed the eviction, offered a different explanation: the motion was retaliation because a council worker had not been allowed to bring his puppy to city hall. Residents who spoke at the meeting were mostly on the cat’s side. Then the internet found it. White said he received more than 1,500 emails supporting Browser, from all fifty states and from Australia, England, France, Germany, Singapore, Malaysia, Guam and Canada.

In July 2016 the council voted unanimously to overturn its own decision. The motion to reverse was introduced by Clements, the man who had led the eviction, and he blamed social media for turning a local matter into an international one. Browser kept the job.

The Allergy Argument, and Why It Keeps Losing

The serious objection is not about mice or dignity. It is access. A public building has to be usable by the public, and a resident cat makes a building difficult for people with severe cat allergies or asthma.

The case that put this on the record involved Penny, the cat at the Swansea Public Library in Massachusetts. A resident named Patrick Higgins argued that people allergic to cats could not use the building, that this made the library non-compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that he would take a formal complaint to the Department of Justice if Penny was not removed. A petition supporting the cat collected more than 1,800 signatures and noted that no allergy complaint had ever been filed before. Higgins dropped it.

That is the usual pattern, and it is worth being honest about it. The complaint is legitimate and the resolution is almost always popular pressure rather than a legal finding. Libraries that keep cats manage it with entrance signage, cat-free rooms, air filtration, and a policy of moving the animal on request.

What a Library Cat Is Actually For

The pest control rationale is mostly gone. Modern buildings are sealed, food is banned from most reading rooms, and an exterminator is cheaper than a vet bill. The 1868 argument holds nowhere except old cellars like the Hermitage.

What replaced it is attendance. Spencer Public Library saw roughly 100,000 visitors a year during Dewey’s tenure, in a town of about eleven thousand people. Kishi Station went from a candidate for closure to a destination. The cat is a reason to walk through a door you had no errand at, which is what a public library needs in a decade where it competes with a phone. Cats are also well suited to the job, since they choose their own visitors and make the interaction feel earned rather than provided. How they pick is partly a question of how cats see the world, which is nothing like how you do.

There is a second function that librarians talk about more than the press does. A cat lowers the social temperature of a room. Children who read aloud badly will read aloud to an animal, and reading programs built on that principle now run in libraries and schools in several countries. The cat does not correct pronunciation. That is the entire pedagogical mechanism, and it works better than it has any right to, which is also useful to anyone rebuilding the habit of remembering what you read.

None of this is separate from the broader fight over what public libraries are for. The same institutions absorbing record numbers of book challenges are the ones defending a cat in a council chamber, and it is the same argument in a smaller costume: who decides what a shared room feels like. The commercial side, where independent bookstores have grown sharply since 2020, worked this out too. A shop cat is a business decision.

The cat, meanwhile, is running an older program. Nine hours asleep on a warm radiator near the reference desk, three hours of surveillance, one public appearance near closing. It is a working model of slow living, run by a species that never read a book about it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do library cats get paid?

Historically yes, as a food allowance drawn from public funds. British Post Office cats were on one shilling a week from September 1868, raised to one shilling and sixpence by 1873, and Tibs the Great earned two shillings and sixpence a week. Modern library cats are usually funded by staff collections, donations, or a small line in the Friends of the Library budget rather than a wage.

How many library cats are there?

There is no current census. The best figure comes from documentary maker Gary Roma, who cataloged more than 800 library cats worldwide during the 1990s. The Library Cat Society, founded in 1987, kept a list until it disbanded in the late 1990s, and nothing has replaced it.

Who was the most famous library cat?

Dewey Readmore Books, found in the book drop of the Spencer Public Library in Iowa in January 1988 and resident there until November 2006. Vicki Myron’s 2008 book about him became an international bestseller. The Scottish Folds Baker and Taylor of Minden, Nevada are more widely seen, since they fronted a book distributor’s campaign from 1988.

Are library cats legal in public buildings?

It depends on local rules. In Russia, Kuzya needed a cat passport, a microchip and a rabies vaccination before he could be kept at the Novorossiysk children’s library. In the United States the recurring challenge is accessibility rather than health code. Most disputes end in public pressure and local policy, not courts.

Why are cats associated with libraries and not dogs?

The original reason is functional. Cats hunt rodents that eat paper and glue, they need no walking, and they are quiet. The cultural association came later and is heavily loaded with older folklore about cats as guardians and omens, a history covered in more depth in the record of black cat superstitions. Dogs were never on the Post Office payroll.

The Bottom Line

The thread from a shilling a week in 1868 to a Texas council reversing itself in 2016 is not sentimentality. Public institutions kept cats because cats solved a real problem, and kept them after it was solved because the animals did something else useful: they make an official building feel like a place rather than a facility. Library cats are the last visible survivors of a very old employment category, and the paperwork is more thorough than most people expect. Somewhere right now a cat is asleep on a returns trolley, technically on duty.

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