This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
02/09/2022 07:24 AMPeople are always dividing the world: chocolate versus vanilla, late sleepers versus early risers, dog people versus cat fanciers.
When it comes to felines versus canines, noted graphic artists Jan Cummings and Peter Good know where they stand. They are cat people and they have just put out a book to prove it: Cats Can, Homage to Feline Felicity.
The small book, 6 inches by 6 inches and 84 pages, is a blend of art, photographs and collages featuring their own cats—“Past or present love interests of the artist-designers,” as the book describes them.
Cummings and Good started out with two cats when they got married in 1965 and they have had cats ever since, often in pairs. Good estimated probably more than 20 in all over the years.
The current cats-in-residence are a sister and brother rescues, Wanda and Marlowe.
Good doesn’t buy into the notion that cats are distant and aloof, at least not theirs.
“They snuggle; they come to bed. They like attention and they like to be near us,” he said.
The couples’ living room includes cat amenities, chief among them a large tree trunk, with fabric wrapped in several areas, an elegant scratching post for resident felines. The driftwood tree trunk, described as a Hudson River treasure, has been with them and their cats since the early days of the marriage when they lived in a rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
The art work in Cats Can is all done by the Cummings and Good except for several childhood creations of their now-grown sons Justin and Jesse.
“I adore drawing cats,” Cummings said.
Cummings and Good themselves are pictured in the book, but in keeping with the theme, they are drawn with pointy ears on top of their heads and whiskers.
The art is accompanied by appropriate short written selections, poems, song lyrics, even a research paragraph on whiskers. Some are authored by the Cummings but there are also excerpts from Emily Dickinson, Cole Porter, and Bob Dylan.
The cat book had its origins in other work Cummings and Good projects particularly the imaginative calendars they did for so many years.
They had always wanted to do a calendar featuring cats but couldn’t get it to work out in the format they used. Cummings explained all the calendar themes were four letter words but never plurals as cats would have been. According to Cummings, the inventive word play that was a feature of the calendar “didn’t make sense in the plural.”
“We talked about doing a cat book, a ‘cat-alogue,’ but we were always too busy,” Cummings said.
In 2018, however, the pair stopped doing commercial graphics, selling the building they owned in the center of Chester. They have not, however stopped designing, but now they do it from their Chester home.
“We’re doing things we love,” Cummings said. “We love doing books.”
The ease of publication in the computer age made creating books a practical project.
“The digital revolution means you can do small quantities [of books] without the costs for offset and lithography,” Good pointed out.
Cummings and Good designed and produced a book on ephemera for the Chester Historical Society, dedicated to the late Al Malpa, an ephemera collector. Ephemera are vintage items that often disappear, old receipts, invitations of social gatherings, newspaper clips that can give a nuanced picture of what life was like in a bygone era.
“The day after we sent the files on ephemera, we thought we had to do a book on what we loved most, cats.,” Cummings said.
Still, Cats Can will not be the pair’s last book. Cummings already has plans for another small volume that she is tentatively calling Petals and Wings.
“It will be about flowers, flying things and feathered things,” she said.
Cats Can is available locally at Lark in Chester, Celebrations in Deep River, and The Chester Gallery as well as at Amazon and on Cummings and Good’s website, cummings-good.com. It comes in two versions, the book alone and a premium signed edition with cards and cat stickers.