DOWNTON TABBY

Downton Tabby is about England’s oldest and finest family of cats in people clothes. With beautiful (and scandalous) photographs and art, it tells the story of their lives and loves – and their maids and butlers and cooks’ lives and loves -- from the sinking of the Kitanic to the Jazz Age. Tolstoy’s adage about each family being unhappy in their own way? What makes the Grimalkins different is they’re cats.

Posh, spoiled, stuck-up-but-charming, English cats.

Okay, it’s not just about cats and class warfare. It’s also a parody of Downton Abbey, the phenomenally popular TV show where everyone’s always getting dressed. Or they’re already dressed, and they’re getting more dressed.

While it makes affectionate fun of Downton Abbey, it makes a broader humorous point: We treat our cats like high society. Their servants are us. If you live with a cat, the butler, maid and cook is you.

It’s our cats’ world. We just lint-roll it.

So it’s for fans of the show, and people who put up with fans of the show, and also for people who’ve ever caught themselves getting emotionally involved in their cat’s social life, and whether or not some cold cuts would cheer her up.

Why is this a book about Edwardian manor life, acted out by cats? The real question is why aren’t there more?

Chris Kelly writes for HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. He won an Emmy for his work on Michael Moore's TV Nation. He's been an editor at Spy and the National Lampoon, a staff writer for the Late Show with David Letterman, head writer at Politically Incorrect, and a writer/producer on a half dozen network situation comedies, some long-running and some that barely aired at all.