Reviews

The Photographed Cat: Picturing Close Human-Feline Ties 1900-1940 by Arnold Arluke, Lauren Rolfe

balancinghistorybooks's review

3.0

Lauren Rolfe, one of the contributors to this volume, is ‘a collector of early-twentieth century animal photographs’, something which I find utterly adorable. The whole idea of this book is lovely, in fact. The introduction is nicely written and set out, and I love the way in which it ties in the history of mankind and such things as the Suffrage movement, all the while making it entirely applicable to the world’s growing love of felines. I like the academic feel of the book, too. Some of the photographs were incredibly sweet, and my personal favourites involved cats being dressed up. (As you can see from the image I’ve used at the start of this review, my own cat adores being dressed up). Now for the negatives. In the Kindle version of this book, the footnotes are a little odd. It would have been far better, I feel, to have them all collected in one place at the end of book with hyperlinks leading from the corresponding text, rather than being plonked in any which way. I was reading a paragraph, and it was cut off right in the middle by a footnote, which became rather irksome when it happened repeatedly. The book felt disjointed at times in consequence. The format, in this sense, was not overly good for a Kindle book, and the photographs were tiny unless you patiently went through each one and enlarged them.