Andertoons by Mark Anderson for June 18, 2023

It’s important to have the right fittings in a successful retail business.

set the bar

I want to be first in line when they open.

Love book stores! Go to the Humane Society for a rescue kitty!

Is this a take on some famous novel?

No there’s a new niche/genre in one-panel cartooning called DTC, short for Drive Them Crazy. The author creates a picture with no meaning whatsoever to see just how far readers will go to solve it (creating reddit threads, earnestly asking he creator for the punch line, etc.) Me? I think this strip was an homage to 1920s nouveau-riche hob-snobbery.

I saw a cat lying on the payment counter at a gift shop in Europe. It turned out to be stuffed…

All good bookstores, and other shoppes, have a cat on the premises. Some have more than one.

Every bookstore used to have at least one mouser. Rodents have done more damage to literature than all the book banners combined.

On a recent visit to a bookstore in Grover Beach, I was crouching to read the titles on the lowest shelf, when the bookstore cat came over and helpfully climbed onto my “lap”. Fortunately, I enjoy cats and vice versa. :)

There is no complicated, subtle joke here. Just playing on the “meme” of every used bookstore has a requisite resident cat. When I was in grad school, I had a part-time job at a used bookstore. They had a cat named Schrödinger.

Cats know I’m a soft touch for a belly rub. I always presume I’ll end up with a cat on my lap in a bookstore.

mice!