Last year, after first meeting my puppy I asked on my blog for name suggestions, "...ideally literary and fey." Got many terrific ones. Since I can't give the link, it was on June 6, 2008 for anyone interested in seeing them.

Hello, kitty.

Veruca has great cattitude.

I had a dog named Winnie the Pooch...

My neighbor has a cat named Walt Whitman.

And of course, there was Dewey Readmore Books who lived for nineteen years at the public library in Spencer, Iowa. About a year ago, there was a book published about him. How much more bookish can you get?

I once had a Chinese Sharpei. We named him Little Bo Pei, as in Little Bo Peep, Bo Schembechler and Sharpei!

Last fall we found a small cat who had been dumped in the parking lot of our public library. She was about 7 or 8 months old then. She turned out to be a spunky little thing so we named her Scout!!!

At the second location of The Book Barn in Niantic, CT there is a Guinea Pig named Paige.

Okay, it's not a real live pet, but our Deer Run Branch has a concrete deer outside that they dress for holidays and seasons....his name is Booker.

Our bookshop dog (who has been my dog for 14 years, 9 years longer than there has been a bookstore to inhabit) is named Seymour, after Salinger's Seymour Glass, who was quite the eccentric. (Seymour the bookshop dog is half Basset Hound, half Siberian Husky.) Trivia: I almost named the store Seymour Books.

My husband and I had a cat named The Great Catsby

I have a cat named Grimoire. Although he's less of a witch's book of spells and more like a cat that ATE a witch's book of spells...

Our boys had a guinea pig they named Winnie-the-Pig.

This is the bookstore where my husband proposed to me! Well, before it was remodeled. I've seen that cat quite a few times.

I have a cat named Prunesquallor, the last names of a brother-sister pair in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.

I had an orange cat named Orlando, after Kathleen Hale's Orlando!

My roommate and I had a cat named Mephistopheles (I was thinking T.S. Eliot, but Mephie was more often Faustian in nature). He was a great Maine coon cat, and he loved to take cat naps with me. Sadly, he passed last year.

I had an all white cat named Hemingway who used to help me check proofs on the reference books I was publishing at the time. Now I have a Caruso and a Fellini. One of my artist friends had a pair of finches named Franny and Zoey, and then moved on to cats named Magic and Marker (after the finches were gone).

I had cats named Orlando (after Woolf) and Eliot. My new kitten's name is Thoby (after Woolf's brother)

Yeah! Isbn is a great cat and does a fantastic job in the store. Lots of fans come in to tell us how much they love him.

A club for musicians in Chicago named its cat ClawThePussy.

A character whose last name is Isbn appears as one of many "inside publishing" jokes in the forthcoming middle-reader book, Leaving the Bellwethers. It's a caper novel about a lighthouse-dwelling family by Kristin Clark Ventuni.

omigosh, spelling error! Kristin Clark Venuti.

I knew a lady with two dogs named Bilbo and Pippen from Lord of the Rings.

My first cat was named Gus, after Augustus the Cat in P.G. Wodehouse. By the time I had my bookstore, the cat I had was named Beaker (size 3 head, size 7 nose) and although he was a dear cat he wasn't too bright (size 1 brain) and I couldn't trust him not to zip out the door into the street, but he was hit at the local nursing home.