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July 25, 2025

Booker T. Jones enjoys napping in the front window of Wild Rumpus. Eric Ruby for The New York Times

	By Joumana Khatib

Dear readers,

It’s not every day you encounter a bookstore employee with a tail.

My colleague Liz Egan, as she so often does, recently landed a dream assignment: profiling the various cats, dogs, rabbits, chinchillas and lizards that populate bookstores across the United States.

Animals have long been furry, steadfast mascots for bookstores, and a number of businesses have put themselves on the map with their creatures, Egan reports. (See: a tortoise in Vermont named Veruca Salt who has amassed a four-digit online following.) While it’s hard to know whether animals promote book sales, they certainly encourage foot traffic.

And, of course, they inspire great works of literature themselves: I recently reread “H Is for Hawk,” Helen Macdonald’s magnificent autobiography, which is in good company among a spate of new books about writers and wild animals.

I wish you a weekend of off-leash reading!

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