When a puzzled publisher passed the apparently encoded typescript to Paul Gallico, that doyen of animal-loving writers soon realised that this was not so much a manuscript as a ‘paw-u-script’ …typed not by human fingers but by a furry feline paw.
Which is how he came to decipher this singularly expert survey of cats and their humans and to reveal its author as a ‘not ill-favoured’ cat of superior intelligence.

The Silent Miaow is a book of instruction for kittens, strays and homeless cats based upon first-hand feline experience… how to win a way into a household, take over a family and achieve control over each member, how to select a family and what to look for, how to move in, how to establish total and unquestioned sovereignty over the most comfortable chair, how to obtain the choicest food, how to treat visitors, how to conduct a romance and how to pass all this wisdom on to the kittens.
There’s some astute guidance on that most irresistible cat stratagem, The Silent Miaow itself, and a wealth of illuminating observation of human behaviour for extra good measure.

The author of The Silent Miaow has been doubly fortunate in finding so sympathetic an editor as Paul Gallico, himself taken over by a succession of seventeen cats, and so admiring a portrait photographer as Jane Burton, whose photographs provide such delightful illustration for this unrivalled classic of the cat.