He was a yellow tabby with twinkling green eyes, who arrived in the overnight drop box of a farmland library one frigid January night. Dewey Readmore Books became the library’s star boarder and an international celebrity.
Now he’s the subject of a best-seller that chronicles the struggles of the library worker who found the trembling kitten, the town that embraced him and Dewey himself.
“Dewey, the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World,” by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter, has 336,000 copies in print and has quickly climbed to the top 10 on The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly and other lists of best-sellers.
“It has great appeal,” Paul Ingram, buyer at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City, says, comparing it to the hugely popular “Marley &Me,” about the joys and headaches of a difficult Labrador retriever. Ingram says “Dewey” attracts an odd mix of pet lovers and history buffs thanks to its weaving of the cat’s exploits with the history of a small town and Iowa.
Myron decided to include more in her book than just the story of Dewey because the town, the cat and Myron herself were closely linked. “When we tried to write just a cat book it didn’t work. We had to tell the whole story for it to make sense,” she says during a break from a book tour in Des Moines.
Dewey, named after the Dewey Decimal System used by libraries to catalog books, quickly became well known in Spencer, a farm town of about 11,000, although no one is sure why the rest of the world cared about the him. But they did. Writers and TV crews came from as far away as Japan to the plains of northwest Iowa to see Dewey.
“It’s very hard to put into words,” Myron said. “I always called it Dewey’s magic because there is no other word for it.
“When people met Dewey … they went home and told all their friends and neighbors about it, or kept articles about him or wrote an article. We would get weekly newspaper articles from little towns all around the United States that people had shared his story and it had made the newspaper and those people never forgot,” Myron says.
Dewey was discovered in the Spencer library’s overnight drop box in January 1988, a time when Iowa was in the midst of an economic chill that had gripped the nation. Spencer is a town that hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, with a downtown of family-owned stores in connecting two- and three-story brick buildings, a second-run movie theater and The Hen House, which sells decorating items to farmwives.
Myron bonded immediately with Dewey as she lifted the tiny kitten from the book drop that January morning.
“He was so cold and half starved and very dirty. He didn’t look like much until I picked him up and he started purring immediately and he looked in my eyes with his eyes,” she says. “He had the most gorgeous eyes I had ever seen and I felt a connection with him right away.”
A petite woman with thick, short brown hair who wears wire-rimmed glasses, Myron was struggling back then to make ends meet — a divorced mother trying to raise a daughter, working full time at the Spencer library and studying to get her master’s degree. She had only been on the job for six months and had wanted to make the library more homey. Dewey would fit right in.
Patrons took to him quickly, and over time visitors increased from 60,000 a year to more than 100,000. Many were suffering from the crippling economy that hit the farming community especially hard, and Myron thinks Dewey lifted their spirits and made them a bit more eager to stop off at the library.
“Dewey didn’t bring jobs to Spencer, but there were a lot of farmers who came in to fill out the first resume of their life. They didn’t know how to use the computer, they were having a tough time and were really down when they came in. Dewey won them over and put a smile on their face,” Myron says.
“He … was something to be proud of when Spencer didn’t have a lot to be proud of.”
She described Dewey as an “old soul.”
“You could see down into his soul through his eyes and he would look at you the same way,” she says. “It was his personality: He was so loving and mellow. He didn’t care who you were.”
Myron says her book is a story of unconditional love, companionship and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps during tough times.
“Hopefully, it’s a message of hope for people because the economic times now are very similar,” she says.
Dewey died on Nov. 29, 2006, at age 19. Since then, the library has received more than 100 offers for a new Dewey, but the library board decided to wait at least two years before deciding whether to get another cat, says Myron, who retired at the end of last year.
Dewey’s ashes were buried in the lawn outside the library. A granite marker was placed at the site.
Myron believes his legacy will live on in a possible movie deal and in the stories people share about him.
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