Helen Monnette Amestoy Collection
of Books About Cats

The Helen Monnette Amestoy Collection of Books on Cats is the largest known collection of cat books in any library: this growing collection contains more than 6,000 volumes, primarily children's picture books. Helen Monnette Amestoy was a prominent California librarian who spent a lifetime collecting these materials. After her death in 2004, her daughters Margot Amestoy Antinoja and Kami Amestoy Lee donated the collection to the Arne Nixon Center.

The collection includes a signed and numbered copy of the 1930 Book of Cats, Being Twenty Drawings by Japanese painter and etcher Tsugouharu Foujita (1886-1968), combined with the "prose poems" of Michael Joseph, a London publisher. Other highlights include foreign language editions, miniature books, books illustrated with photographs and comic strips, travel books, cat psychology books, quotation books, titles by Louis Wain, Clare Turlay Newberry, and Kathleen Hale, and sub-collections of Puss in Boots, The Three Little Kittens, and Dick Whittington and His Cat.

In addition to books, the collection includes framed pictures, periodicals, puzzles, dolls, posters, audio and video cassettes, ceramic plates and figures, calendars, postcards, statues, and other ephemera.

To celebrate the acquisition of this collection, the Arne Nixon Center has adopted a theme song, "Bad Kitty," written and performed by Marianne Baker, a Canadian artist, and used here with her permission.