Horatio has a growing fan base in Centre County. Now, he has his own calendar

Being an internet star and wearing handmade costumes is just another day in the life of a furry feline named Horatio from Centre County.

Horatio is a 10-year-old domestic shorthair ginger tabby owned by Lisa Shaffer, who is the bibliographic services assistant at the Bellefonte branch of the Centre County Library and Historical Museum.

In 2014, Shaffer was looking for a way to spice up the library’s social media presence. She had heard of the popular internet meme of posting pictures of cats every Saturday called “caturday,” and decided to try it out for herself.

Shaffer is the owner of seven cats, but Horatio has been the main star of her weekly photo shoots.

For the past four years, Shaffer has dressed Horatio up in homemade costumes every Saturday. He’s worn everything from hockey player’s uniforms to historical garb, and even Bette Midler’s iconic “Hocus Pocus” costume to celebrate Halloween.

Shaffer makes most of her costumes with usual household items and craft supplies like paper plates, felt, yarn and pipe cleaners. She tries to reuse all costumes and props for other photoshoots.

“It started out simple by just posing Horatio with a book to advertise, and it grew from there,” Shaffer said. “I plan the costumes and props by what event is going on during that particular Saturday.”

For followers who return to the Facebook page every week to see what Horatio is up to, there is now a 2019 Caturday Calendar, which features some of Horatio’s best looks.

“A lot of people encouraged me to put together a calendar with all the photos — so I sat down with a good friend of mine and we worked out the logistics and gathered 14 photos and put it together,” Shaffer said. “The hardest part was narrowing it down to just 14.”

During awards season last year, Shaffer and Horatio did a full week of photos as a “countdown to the Oscars,” featuring each film that was nominated for best picture. In the calendar, all nine of the photos displaying the nominees are featured during the month of February.

No need to worry if Horatio likes being dressed up — according to Shaffer he is a ham for the camera, and she makes sure no costume is restraining, so they are comfortable for Horatio.

“Horatio has such a calm temperament — it’s funny, when he sees me working on costumes, it’s like he knows the outfits are for him,” Shaffer said. “He definitely likes it, and he always gets treats as a reward.

The Caturday calendar is a new and unique fundraiser for the library, and Denise Sticha, the executive director of the library, who said it has been a lot of putting this fundraiser together.

“We just love Horatio!” Sticha said in an email. “We thought people in our library community might like to have a collection of popular Caturday pictures and the idea of developing a calendar and then piloting it as a small fundraiser just unfolded from there. Books, libraries and cats seem to go well together.”

Pre-orders of the “2019 Caturday Calendar” are available through Nov. 28. They can be purchased at any of the library branches for $12, or purchased online and shipped for an additional $3. All proceeds go back to the Centre County Library and Historical Museum.

Shaffer has plans to continue this tradition in 2020 and said she is excited to have more time so she can include more trivia, puns and embellishments to make it bigger and better.

Don’t worry dog lovers, there is also a plan in the works to create a dog calendar as well with a friend of the library named Faolin, a Scottish terrier who is a certified therapy dog.

“Really I wanted to do this to put something good out in the world,” Shaffer said, “if it makes people happy then we’ve done our job.”