Patrons took to him quickly, and over time visitors increased from 60,000 a year to more than 100,000. She had only been on the job for six months and had wanted to make the library more homey. “He had the most gorgeous eyes I had ever seen and I felt a connection with him right away.”Ī 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. 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 was so cold and half starved and very dirty. Writers and TV crews came from as far away as Japan to the plains of northwest Iowa to see Dewey. We had to tell the whole story for it to make sense,” she says during a break from a book tour in Des Moines.ĭewey, 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. “When we tried to write just a cat book it didn't work. 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.
Ingram says that “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. “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. “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.
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