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

The library automation wasn’t yet complete. To check out a book, we still stamped two cards. One went home with you in the book; the other went into a big bin with hundreds of other cards. When you returned the book, we pulled that card and put the book back on the shelf. Actually there were two bins, one on each side of the front desk. Sure enough, Dewey had peed in the front right corner of one of them.

I wasn’t mad at Dewey. I was worried about him. He’d been in the library for years; he’d never acted out. This was completely out of character. But I didn’t have long to think the situation through before one of our regular patrons came up and whispered in my ear, “You better get down here, Vicki. There’s a bat in the children’s department.”

Sure enough, there was the bat, hanging by his heels behind a ceiling beam. And there was Dewey at my heels.

I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve let a patron find it. We could have taken care of this before anyone arrived. Now there are children in the library. I thought you were protecting them.

Have you ever been lectured by a cat? It’s not a pleasant experience. Especially when the cat is right. And especially when a bat is involved. I hate bats. I couldn’t stand the thought of having one in the library, and I couldn’t imagine being trapped all night with that thing flying all over the place. Poor Dewey.

“Don’t worry, Dewey. Bats sleep during the day. He won’t hurt anybody.”

Dewey didn’t look convinced, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I didn’t want to scare the patrons, especially the children, so I quietly called the city hall janitor and told him, “Get down to the library right away. And bring your ladder.”

He climbed up for a look. “It’s a bat, all right.”

“Shhh. Keep your voice down.”

He climbed down. “You got a vacuum cleaner?”

I shivered. “Don’t use the vacuum cleaner.”

“How about Tupperware? Something with a lid.”

I just stared at him. This was disgusting.

Someone said, “We’ve got an empty coffee can. It’s got a lid.”

The ordeal was over in a matter of seconds. Thank goodness. Now I had to sort out the mess in the cards.

“This is my fault,” I told Jackie, who was still manning the circulation desk.

“I know.” Jackie has a droll sense of humor.

“Dewey was trying to warn us. I’ll clean this up.”

“I figured you would.”

I pulled out about twenty cards. Underneath them was a big pile of bat guano. Dewey hadn’t just been trying to get my attention; he’d been using his scent glands to cover the stench of the intruder.

“Oh, Dewey, you must think I’m so stupid.”

The next morning, Dewey started what I referred to as his sentry phase. Each morning, he sniffed three heating vents: the one in my office, the one by the front door, and the one by the children’s library. He sniffed each one again after lunch. He knew those vents led somewhere and that therefore they were access points. He had taken it upon himself to use his powerful nose to protect us, to be our proverbial canary in the coal mine. His attitude was, If you can’t even figure out there’s a bat in the library, how are you going to take care of all these people?

I suppose there could be something funny about such a vigilant cat. What was Dewey worried about, a terrorist attack on the Spencer Public Library? Call me sentimental, but I found it very endearing. At one point in his life, Dewey wasn’t content until he expanded his world to the street outside the library. Now that his story had gone all over the country, he wanted nothing more than to hunker down in the library and protect his friends. You would have to love a cat like that, right?

And the world apparently did, because Dewey’s fame continued to grow. He was featured in all the cat magazines—Cats, Cat Fancy, Cats & Kittens. If the magazine had cat in the title, Dewey was probably in it. He even appeared in Your Cat, a leading publication of the British feline press. Marti Attoun, a young freelance writer, traveled to Spencer with a photographer. Her article appeared in American Profile, a weekend insert featured in more than a thousand newspapers. Then, in the summer of 1996, a documentary filmmaker from Boston turned up in out-of-the-way Spencer, Iowa, camera in tow, ready to put Dewey in his first movie.