Welcome to the first Special Collections blog post! I’m Katie, the Senior Library Assistant for Collections.

With all the English Faculty Library rare book collections moving off-site by the time of our Schwartzman Centre move in 2025, we’ve been going through, boxing to archival standard, and admiring our hoard. With over 6000 books in the Rare Books Room alone, there’s a lot to do! We had the idea to use this overview to highlight cool, unique, weird, and otherwise fun stuff in our rare book collections!

Therefore, to make light of the amount of work still ahead of us, I decided to kick these updates off with one of our goofiest holdings – the 1940 edition of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot.

This is the first illustrated edition, which is what drew me to it on the shelf (as well as my childhood love for Macavity the Mystery Cat!). The dustjacket had started to crumble away with time, so after this first photo was taken I jacketed it (with library-grade materials, an easily-reversible process) to support and protect it – we don’t want to lose our handsome cat couple! Illustrated in full by Nicolas Bentley, each poem receives its own full-page illustration, as well as closing with an outline of a cat.

‘Mr. Mistoffelees’. Which kitten best expresses how you feel today? I would say I’m the orange one tangled in yarn.

However, it wasn’t just these great illustrations that drew me to this item, but the fact in the back there was a piece of publishing paraphernalia; just a fun extra, or so I thought…

Page from Faber and Faber’s 1951 Autumn/Winter catalogue, discussing Cat Morgan.

The poem ‘Cat Morgan introduces himself’.

Despite the pretence, Morgan was, of course, not the author of either work; T.S. Eliot wrote the poem, ‘Cat Morgan Introduces Himself’, while Morley Kennerley, one of the Faber and Faber board members, wrote the introduction upon receipt of the poem, ‘without any thought whatsoever, for I simply haven’t had time’ (The Poems of T.S. Eliot p75), as part of the publishing houses 1951 Autumn/Winter catalogue. This catalogue was the first time this poem was published; it was not incorporated into Practical Cats until 1953. Morgan, a generous cat, also chose not to assert his copyright, (“Morgan’s verses may be reproduced without his permission”), allowing the poem to subsequently be republished in multiple newspapers at the time. To enable this during post-war paper shortages, ‘[Morgan] is sympathetic to the problem of others and has so arranged his natural history that the first and last verses form an entity when printed by themselves”.

However, despite the initial kind waiver of copyright, it’s still rather valuable – and there was no record that the EFL had a copy of Morgan hidden away with his fellow Practical Cats. Just like the real Cat Morgan, it seems to have found its way here with mysterious provenance, but now it’s turned up, we all love it just as much (and have added a note to the record, to acknowledge his fine presence). What other secrets may be hiding away inside the books of the Rare Books Room?

Me, upon finding this cool item! (Actually the main illustration from ‘Shimbleshanks: The Railway Cat’.)

Unfortunately, while the letter says, ‘Photographs of authors available’, I can’t turn up any pictures of the original Cat Morgan. This elegant outline in the sheet, showing his rich black fur, is the closest we’ll visually get (at least for now), leaving each of us to imagine the finest black cat we can.

References and further reading

• Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. Available (in multiple editions) in the library.
• ‘Cat Morgan Introduces Himself’. Another copy is available at the Weston.
• The Poems of T.S. Eliot (vol. 2). This includes more information about the history of the real Cat Morgan. The most relevant extracts can be found on pages 75-77. Available in the library.
• ‘1940s‘, Faber and Faber website. No direct mentions of Cat Morgan, but discussion of T.S. Eliot’s time at the publishing house on Russell Square.