Cats in camera

Cats in camera
Andre Deutsch / Jan Styczynski
Ongenummerde pagina’s
Jaar: 1962
Afmeting: 24 x 25 cm
ISBN: niet van toepassing

Conditie: het boek ‘Cats in camera’ verkeert in nette staat

Preface ‘Cats in camera’
This enchanting volume of Cats in camera, as far as I am aware, is the first survey of the feline world to emerge from Poland, and as such it has more than a merely feline interest.
In its modest way it brings us closer to a country which few of us have visited, and reminds us that however different people may be in different places, there is one thing which we all have in common: cats.
Here the cats of Poland come stepping elegantly onto the stage, supreme show-stealers as usual, to take their bow in the spotlight of world publicity.
Black cats, white cats, grey cats, tabby cats … not that it matters what colour they are, so long as they are cats

Cats are the same the world over, as independent and as graceful as the music of Chopin.
The alley cats in this volume of Cats in camera – my special favourites – are as untrammelled, as piratical and sometimes as forlorn as the alley cats of Liverpool or Stepney.
The haughty white Persians and the sleek, sophisticated Siamese, with their jewelled eyes, their glistening fur and their exquisite poise, are all elegance and luxury, looking as if they had emerged from some expensive beauty parlour, just as they would look in Mayfair.
And a great many of the cats here belong to neither extreme, but are ordinary cats if a cat can ever be ordinary – going about their business in an ordinary way, and suggesting as they do so that wherever life goes on it is, in many important ways, the same.

To me the principal pleasure of this book is that it is a “good news’ story.
When I think of Poland, I think inevitably of the war, and the days when Warsaw was reeling and aflame. In such tragedies it is not only the men and the women and the children who are chucked into hell – it is also the animals that they have gathered around them, a multitude of small, furry, defenceless creatures
who have somehow become involved in a chaos that was none of their contriving.
Is it sentimental and illogical to remember these things and to worry about them?
Maybe it is. I do not greatly care.
For whenever I read about the world’s disasters – whether they are ‘acts of God’ or acts of man- I find myself increasingly concerned by the agonies which these disasters must occasion to animals involved in them.
This is not to suggest that one is besotted about animals, nor that one has no sense of priorities; obviously the human race must come first.
But the human race, after all, is articulate – the animals are not; and the human race has at its command vast resources for the alleviation of pain.
Most important of all, it is the human race who through greed or arrogance or sheer stupidity start the wars and wreak the ruin and blast the cities and fire the forests and poison the wells, while the wretched animals, uprooted from their natural surroundings, have nothing to do but cower in terror.
So it is good to see that the feline scene in Poland, which must once have been desolate, is now restored.
These cats prowling their alleys, sunning themselves on their window-sills, balancing delicately along fences, picking their way fastidiously through snow – serene cats, proud cats, angry cats, affectionate cats they are again sharing the lives of their people as cats should, reminding us that some things will survive the worst disasters and will grow again, and that the relationship between man and animal is one of them.
The cats in this book ‘Cats in camera’ are living a real lifee, nonchalantly playing their humanizing role – for that is a paradoxical function of the animal, to make man more human.
their international language, they are bringing a natural grace to life… in short,
they are doing a cat-size job.
@ Cats in camera