The Centre County Library is bringing book selections to life with their “Caturday” social media posts that are posted on Saturdays. The posts feature a book selection from the library, along with a cat sitting next to the book.

Onward State sat down and spoke with Lisa Shaffer, the bibliographic and patron services manager of the library, and the owner of the cats that are featured in the posts. In her role, Lisa catalogues all of the new material that enters the library.

Shaffer had spoken with the communications manager in early 2012 about doing more with the social media accounts. “The library didn’t do much with the Twitter account, and I knew Caturday as a meme,” she said. That’s when she asked if she could start posting pictures of her cats alongside books for “Caturday”.

“It just started off very simply with photos of my cats and books,” Shaffer said. There weren’t any costumes involved in the beginning. Shaffer tries to correlate the book selections with the holidays, birthdays of authors, or national holidays on the day the post goes up. This week’s Caturday post highlighted National Library Week, which is from April 19-25.

One of her cats stands out against the others and is the “star” that is featured in most of the posts. Horatio is an orange and white cat who can be seen in almost all of the Caturday posts on The Centre County Library’s social media accounts. Shaffer’s other cats also make occasional guest appearances in the posts, such as Loki the tuxedo cat seen in the featured image.

The celebration of an author’s birthday gave Shaffer the idea to try having Horatio wear a party hat, using encouragement with treats, of course. She started adding more props to the images over time and created a background setup for the images to be taken in. This is where her idea really took off, and she started thinking about different ways she could add to the images.

“He is pretty laid back, and he loves treats so obviously, like, you know, kind of unconsciously subconsciously trained him,” Shaffer said. “And now he knows when I’m making his costume.”

That’s right, Shaffer actually creates her own costumes for the posts!

She explained that the costumes are mostly made out of felt, and the wigs are made using yarn and pipe cleaners. Shaffer often reuses or modifies costumes already used to create new looks.

Some costumes are simpler to make than others, which can prove to be more complex. These custom cat-sized garments can take Shaffer from 30 minutes to 3 hours to create.

”I feel like over time I’ve gotten better at making cat costumes,” she said. Shaffer has created a pattern for herself, which acts as a base layer for the costumes.

Shaffer explained that the reason she creates these posts is to highlight the library materials and to encourage people to utilize the resources at their local library.

”So there are just so there’s so many different things to be found at libraries that I can’t name them all. Okay yeah. But they are such a wonderful and free community resource.” Shaffer said. “And they’re very welcoming. There’s different activities and clubs that are at libraries across Center County, across the state, and across the country and the world.”

To see more of Horatio, you can follow the library’s Instagram or visit its Facebook page. To get more information on the Centre County Library, you can visit its website.