Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

I showed her the Dewey Carry—over the left shoulder, with his behind in the crook of your arm, head over your back. If you wanted to hold him for any length of time, you had to use the Dewey Carry.

“He’s doing it!” the host whispered excitedly as Dewey draped over her shoulder.

Dewey’s head popped up. What did she say?

“How do I get him to calm down?”

“Just pet him.”

The host stroked his back. Dewey lay his head on her shoulder and cuddled against her neck. “He’s doing it! He’s really doing it! I can feel him purring.” She smiled at her cameraman and whispered, “Are you getting this?”

I was tempted to tell her, “Of course he’s doing it. He does it for everyone,” but why spoil her excitement?

Dewey’s episode aired a few months later. It was called “A Tale of Two Kitties.” (Yes, it’s a pun on Charles Dickens.) The other kitty was Tom, who lived in Kibby’s Hardware in Conrad, Iowa, a small town in the middle of the state. Like Dewey, Tom was found on the coldest night of the year. Store owner Ralph Kibby took the frozen stray to the vet’s office. “They gave him sixty dollars’ worth of shots,” he said on the program, “and said if he’s still alive in the morning he may have a chance.” As I watched the show, I realized why the host was so happy that morning. There were at least thirty seconds of footage of Dewey lying on her shoulder; the best she could get from Tom was a sniff of her finger.

Dewey wasn’t the only one expanding his horizons. During my master’s program I had become very active in state library circles, and after graduation I was elected president of the Iowa Small Library Association, an advocacy group for libraries in towns of less than 10,000 people. Advocacy, at least when I joined, was a stretch. The group had a serious inferiority complex. “We’re small,” they thought. “Who cares about us? Let’s just stick with milk, cookies, and a little gossip. That’s all we’re good for.”

But I had seen firsthand that small didn’t mean irrelevant, and I was inspired. “You don’t think small towns matter?” I asked them. “You don’t think your library can make a difference? Look at Dewey. Every librarian in the state knows Dewey Readmore Books. He’s appeared on the cover of the Iowa library newsletter twice. He appeared twice in the National Library Cat Society newsletter, and he gets fan mail from England and Belgium. He was featured in the state library newsletter . . . of Illinois. I get calls every week from librarians wondering how they can convince their board to let them have a cat. Does that sound irrelevant to you?”

“So we should all get cats?”

“No. You should believe in yourselves.”

And they did. Two years later, the Iowa Small Library Association was one of the most active and respected advocacy groups in the state.

Dewey’s breakthrough, though, came not through my efforts but through the mail. One afternoon the library received a package containing twenty copies of the June/July 1990 issue of Country, a national magazine with a circulation of more than five million. It wasn’t unusual for us to receive magazines from publishers hoping to drum up library subscriptions, but twenty copies? I had never read Country, and I had never spoken to anyone from Country, but I liked its slogan: For Those Who Live In or Long For The Country. I decided to flip through it. Right there, on page 57, was a two-page, full-color article about Dewey Readmore Books of the Spencer Public Library, complete with photographs sent in by a local woman I didn’t even know but whose daughter frequented the library. Clearly she had been going home and telling her mother about the Dew.

It was just a small article, but its impact was extraordinary. For years, visitors told me how much it inspired them. Writers, calling for information for other articles about Dewey, often cited it. More than a decade later, I opened the mail to find a perfectly preserved copy of the article, neatly torn out of the magazine near the fold. The woman wanted me to know how much Dewey’s story meant to her.

In Spencer, people who had forgotten about Dewey or who had never shown any interest in him took notice. Even the crowd at Sister’s Café perked up. The worst of the farm crisis had passed, and our leaders were looking for a way to attract new business. Dewey was getting the kind of national exposure they could only dream of, and of course that energy and excitement was rubbing off on the town. Sure, nobody has ever built a factory because of a cat, but nobody has ever built a factory in a town they’d never heard of, either. Once again, Dewey was doing his part, not just in Spencer this time but out there in the larger world, beyond the cornfields of Iowa.