The Boys

by Nicholas Stuart Gray

If you share your home, your hearth, your plate, your brush and comb and your bed with two other people for seventeen years, you are either all very good friends or stark raving mad. Mr. Stuart Gray is not prepared to commit himself on the subject of his sanity, but will certainly vouch for his friendships with his cats.

Comus and Rufus and the well-known playwright and actor have become to all their friends a unit called "Nick and the Boys." This is the story of their life together. From the time the bright and beautiful Comus arrived, aged four weeks, followed three months later by gentle Rufus, until the present day, here is a blow-by-blow account of the well-loved Boys.

The photographer, Robin Adler, whose lovely studies decorate the book, is famous for his animal pictures and for his series on television. He is a close friend of Nicholas Stuart Gray and has over the last sixteen years gathered for all time the grace and dignity and beauty of the two cats. These series were originally started in order to be used as Christmas cards, but when nearly everyone who received one framed it and hung it on the wall, Messrs. Adler and Gray thought the photographs ought to be shown to a wider public. The publishers agreed with them and this book is the result.

96 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1968

About the author

Nicholas Stuart Gray (23 October 1922, Scotland - 17 March 1981) was a British actor and playwright, perhaps best known for his work in children's theatre in England. He was also an author of children's fantasy; he wrote a number of novels, a dozen plays, and many short stories. Neil Gaiman has written that Gray "is one of those authors I loved as a boy who holds up even better on rereading as an adult". Many other modern fantasy authors, such as Hilari Bell, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Kate Forsyth, Cassandra Golds, Katherine Langrish, Sophie Masson, and Garth Nix, cite Gray's work as something they enjoyed as children.

Perhaps his best-known books are The Seventh Swan and Grimbold's Other World. Gray often produced adaptations or continuations of traditional fairy tales and fantasy works, as in his Further Adventures of Puss in Boots. His The Stone Cage is a re-telling of Rapunzel from a cat's point of view. Over The Hills to Fabylon is about a city whose king has the ability to make it fly off across the mountains if he feels it is in danger.

Gray maintained a long-term collaborative relationship with set designer and illustrator Joan Jefferson Farjeon (sister of Eleanor Farjeon and Harry Farjeon); she supplied the costume and scenic designs for many of the theatrical productions of his plays, as well as the illustrations of his books.

---from wikipedia