Games You Can Play with Your Pussy
by Ira Alterman
The year is 1974. Ira Alterman has written a perfectly sensible guide to cat ownership. He needs a title. He chooses one. Nobody blinks.
The full title — Games You Can Play with Your Pussy (and Lots of Other Stuff Cat Owners Should Know) — is a completely sincere description of the book’s content. It covers interactive play, environmental enrichment, health monitoring, and general feline welfare. It was well-reviewed at the time.
Then the world changed, the internet arrived, and the book found a second life as perhaps the most reliably funny object in secondhand bookshops across the English-speaking world.
The content is entirely innocent. The cover photography, featuring a cat and a ball of yarn, is entirely innocent. The subtitle, in the context of the main title, remains aggressively ambiguous.
It is the perfect gift for someone who loves cats. It is also the perfect gift for someone who doesn’t love cats but has a sense of humor. These categories, when you think about it, cover most people you know.