Former Swampscott Middle School librarian Elyse Cregar has published a book exploring cats and the unusual — and sometimes puzzling — questions surrounding them.
Mews and Views for the Curious Cat Lover explores a smorgasbord of intriguing feline lore by the historian, librarian and professed “cat lady.” The book grew out of Cregar’s writings over the past few years on what she calls “my favorite subject: cats.”
“I’ve been writing for Substack for about two years, and I post these short little articles about cats,” Cregar said. “That’s where the book comes from.”
Born in Chicago, Cregar has worked as a public school library media specialist in Hanover, Pennsylvania; Moscow, Idaho; and Swampscott. During her nine years in the Swampscott Public School District, she digitized the book catalog when the technology was still new to schools.
“I never liked the reading programs that monitor how much kids read and learn the minutia of the book. That doesn’t encourage reading,” Cregar said. “It was a really wonderful job, because everyone really felt the same way.”
Now living in Seattle, Cregar has about 1,200 Substack subscribers, whom she calls “a wonderful community of writers and artists.”
“They’re very supportive,” Cregar said. “I love to write. It’s my happy place.”
The topic around cats started from Cregar’s love for the felines. She said she has “always been mystified by them.”
“They are excellent predators, yet they will sit on your lap and purr,” Cregar said. “Almost every sense is a part of their survival. One of the articles I wrote was about their hearing. Their hearing is so incredibly sensitive – it’s much more sensitive than human hearing – so that when they hear fireworks or something that loud, it actually interferes with their key instinct to survive, and they can’t survive if they can’t hear what’s going on around them.”
Cregar’s new book features 26 short, stand-alone articles about cats. She said the stories focus on facts and ideas readers “might not find on their own,” including the surprising detail that grain grown in soil fertilized by ancient Egyptian cat mummies once made its way into breakfast cereal.
“In the 1880s, some archaeologists found all of these (cat) mummies, so some entrepreneurs gathered about 180,000 cat mummies and brought them to Liverpool, England and some of them to farmers, who spread them out in their fields,” Cregar said. “They grew grain from mummified cats. I just thought that was charming.”
The articles are stand-alone as well, allowing the reader to pick and choose topics that interest them in the moment to read.
“A lot of folks just don’t have time anymore to read long books or things that are going to take a lot of concentration,” Cregar said. “I’m just happy to have people enjoy my writing.”
“Mews and Views for the Curious Cat Lover” is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.
Cregar ordered some books herself, she said, and she will distribute them to some local cat shelters.
“I want people to have it in their hands and enjoy it,” Cregar said.
Cregar is now working on a three-book children’s series, Feline Online and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, which she hopes to publish this year.
