Book of Cats

With work by 150 writers and artists, The Book of Cats is the most comprehensive cat anthology published. It is extravagantly illustrated with over a hundred pictures, 16 in full colour. The Book of Cats includes: P.G. Wodehouse’s Webster, Saki’s Tobermory, Kipling's Cat that Walked by himself, T.S. Eliot’s Macavity and Growltiger, Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffrey, and Don Marquis’s mehitabel. The cat classics of Walter de la Mare, W.W. Jacobs and Edgar Allan Poe. Catty stories from Patricia Highsmith and Jean-Paul Sartre. Cat tales by Ted Hughes, Paul Gallico and Giles Gordon. The cats of Robert Southey, Théophile Gauthier and Feline thoughts by Aldous Huxley, Henry Fielding and Mark Twain. Cat poems by Robert Graves, Marianne Moore, Dorothy L. Sayers, Thomas Gray and Alan Sillitoe. Pussycat rhymes by Ogden Nash, Stevie Smith and Roger McGough. Cat paintings by Bonnard, Chagall, Lucien Freud, Gainsborough, Hockney, Gwen John, Paul Klee and Douanier Rousseau. In all, a rich, affectionate medley of prose, poetry and picture in praise of that most elusive and fascinating of creatures – the cat.

George MacBeth (1932-1992) was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire, Scotland. The son of a coal miner, he won a scholarship to study at New College, Oxford, where he earned a first in philosophy and classics. He went on to produce radio programs for the BBC and during his tenure produced a number of influential poetry and literature programs, including Poet’s Voice, New Comment, and Poetry Now. MacBeth’s own work is identified with The Group, a circle of poets associated with a workshop model and generally seen as rejecting the prevailing irony of British poetry at the time in favour of personal, sometimes extravagant, verse. MacBeth read with Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, a reading linked to new directions in British poetry and sometimes described as the start of the British Poetry Revival. His later collections of poetry tended to eschew the violent imagery of his first, and other later books included The Patient (1992), a volume dealing with the effects of the motor neuron disease from which he ultimately died. In 1975, MacBeth left the BBC and began to write prose. He also published two memoirs: A Child of the War (1987) and My Scotland: Fragments of a State of Mind (1973). He edited the anthologies The Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963), The Penguin Book of Animal Verse (1965), Poetry 1900-1965 (Longman, 1967), The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1969), and co-edited The Book of Cats (Penguin, 1977; Bloodaxe Books, 1991) with Martin Booth.