Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. Source: LIFE photo archive, hosted by Google.

Author W. Somerset Maugham (L) sitting with poet Max Eastman (R) and holding ‘Celestial’ and ‘Thistle,’ Eastman’s Persian cats, with ‘Frosting,’ Eastman’s white collie, at their side during Maugham’s summer on Cape Cod.

“Ettie relaxing on her bed reading Esquire, with her cat and phone close by.”  Photograph by George Silk, Shanghai, China, 1946. Source: LIFE Photo Archive, hosted by Google.

From the book Siamese Cats by Louise Van der Meid, 1960. Photographs by the author. Source: Open Library.

Book cover with woodcut illustration: I Am a Cat, 1906-09. Source: Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

From Wikipedia:

I Am a Cat is a satirical novel written in 1905–1906 by Natsume Sōseki, about Japanese society during the Meiji Period (1868–1912); particularly, the uneasy mix of Western culture and Japanese traditions, and the aping of Western customs.

Sōseki’s original title, Wagahai wa neko de aru, uses very high register phrasing more appropriate to a nobleman, conveying a grandiloquence and self-importance intended to sound ironic, since the speaker, an anthropomorphised domestic cat, is a house cat, not feral.

Page from a delightful children’s book I found in a used book store. 

Dancing Perch: Folk Songs and Ditties (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974). Compiled by N. Kolpakova; translated from the Russian by Fainna Solasko; drawings by Yuri Vasnetsov.

P.S. Animalarium has a wonderful post on Yuri Vasnetsov.

Postcard, 1960. Source: janwillemsen on Flickr. 

Unknown photographer, 1928: 

Image of two kittens, mascots for a fire station, sitting in a firefighter helmet. A firefighter is holding the helmet upside-down, standing on a sidewalk in Chicago, Illinois.

DN-0086445, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum. Via the Library of Congress American Memory site.

Cats on Day Bed by Vermont Historical Society on Flickr.

Woman and cats, 1906 by Powerhouse Museum Collection on Flickr.

Stanley Kubrick: Betsy Von Furstenberg holding a cat in a restaurant, 1950. Source: Museum of the City of New York.