Two keepers, and the one who truly runs the place.
The Black Cat Shop didn’t happen all at once. It came together slowly... and every part of it still matters to how the shop feels today.
This part is ours. Salem’s version comes later.
Istanbul is called the city of cats for a reason. They sit on café chairs like they’ve reserved them, cross the tram tracks like they own the schedule. We arrived expecting a few strays and found a whole parallel citizenship instead. Somewhere in those first weeks, without deciding to, we became the kind of people who stop mid-sentence for a cat sunning itself on a doorstep.
One afternoon on the Galata Bridge, Pamela stopped talking and ran, straight into traffic, before Pedro understood what she’d seen. She came back holding a kitten, barely a few weeks old, and put it into his arms while she went looking for help. We ran through the streets trying to find a vet. We didn’t find one in time. The kitten died in Pedro’s arms before we ever learned its name.
It’s a strange thing, grieving an animal you knew for twenty minutes. But that afternoon stayed with us. Somewhere in it, Pedro made a quiet promise to himself: whatever came next, it would involve taking care of cats, properly, on purpose.
We think of that kitten often. It’s part of why this shop exists at all. If her story moved you the way it still moves us, PETA works every day toward a world with fewer stories like hers.
Support PETA (opens in a new tab)Not long after, we made a small, practical decision that ended up meaning a great deal — we stopped booking hotels and started pet-sitting our way across Europe instead. Less about the money, if we’re honest. We just wanted to keep waking up around animals.
That same trip is where the bookshops crept in. Blackwell’s in Oxford, first and worst, in the best way — we went in for twenty minutes and left over two hours later, both of us quietly certain we’d just seen what a bookshop could actually be. Others followed across the UK, each one adding a little more to an idea neither of us had said out loud yet.
When the trip ended, we went home to Portugal. Pedro started working on a pet shop and making volunteer shifts at a veterinary hospital, while Pamela was doing her Master’s in International Business Law. Ordinary life, mostly, except for the cats. Our new flat backed onto an abandoned house, and within weeks there were cats on our second-floor windowsill, then inside the apartment, then — we counted, eventually, because at some point you have to — fourteen of them.
The trip that finished the idea came later, once Pamela’s Master’s was done. We already loved cats. We already loved bookshops. What Edinburgh gave us was a black cat, small and unbothered and entirely sure of her welcome, who we looked after for a few weeks and never quite got over.
Something about that city matched what we were already building without knowing it: the mist, the hidden closes, the sense that every shop held one more room than it let on. By the time we left, we knew what we were making. And we knew exactly who it had to be named for.
Salem, for what it’s worth, remembers it differently.
In 1849, a ship crossed from Massachusetts carrying more than cargo. Salem came ashore first, and the shop was only ever built around where they chose to sit. Everything since has simply been an act of accommodating a very old, very particular tenant.
— as Salem tells it
Pedro built this shop, line by line — though he'll tell you the idea really began in Istanbul, where his affection for cats first took hold. It was later, in Edinburgh, caring for a special black cat, that the idea of The Black Cat Shop finally clicked into place.
Salem's note: “Competent with code. Occasionally forgets to feed me on time.”
Pamela is the shop's true curator — a lawyer by trade and a book worm by disposition, prone to losing entire afternoons to beautiful covers, whether scrolling online or standing in a shop's stacks. Ask her where she'd live if she could choose anywhere, and she'll say Amsterdam, every time.
Salem's note: “Excellent taste in shelving. Amsterdam is acceptable — cats are welcome there too.”
Salem does not work here. Salem permits the shop to exist around them. Every recommendation, every Bibliomancy reading, every book that finds its way into a stranger's hands does so because Salem has decided it should. The shop's proprietors are, by Salem's own account, excellent staff.
Salem declines to comment on Salem.