De Poezenkrant

When we moved to Amsterdam, Lydia introduced me to Har van Fulpen, and Har introduced me to his friend Piet Schreuders, a graphic designer and editor/publisher/designer of the irregular magazines Furore and De Poezenkrant.

The Pokra, as it's affectionately abbreviated, is about cats. Photographs of cats, articles about cats, old advertisements featuring images of cats, letters to the editor from readers gushing about their ... well, about their cats, mostly. To keep himself amused, Piet designs every issue to look completely different from every other issue, often spoofing other magazines and existing design styles. (If you have the Flash plug-in, you can visit the Pokra website here. Click on your browser's "back" button to return to this page.)

Somewhere along the line, I wrote an article titled, "The Adventure of the Cat's Meow," in which I "proved" that Sherlock Holmes' archenemy, Professor James Moriarty, after dying at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland while trying (apparently successfully but, as was later revealed, unsuccessfully) to throw Holmes into the maelstrom far below, was later reincarnated as a ... well, as a cat, actually, and that said cat was later written about in T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as Macavity, "the Napoleon of Crime."

Ahem.

Anyway, Piet liked the article and ran it — in English, for some reason — in the Autumn 1982 issue of De Poezenkrant, illustrated with a lovely Edward Gorey engraving of Macavity. You can see the illustration and read the article here. I later reprinted the article in the November 1987 issue of The Short Sheet.

Piet is the author of Paperbacks, USA, which I translated from Dutch into English.

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