Andy Warhol's twenty-five Sams: the self-published book that came before pop art

In early 1954, a commercial illustrator of twenty-five named Andrew Warhola shared a cramped apartment on East 75th Street with his mother, Julia, recently arrived from Pittsburgh. They were surrounded by cats. Julia, who painted flowers on cardboard and signed them in ornate calligraphy, kept at least fifteen animals in the apartment. Andrew, who had not yet shortened his surname and had not yet been persuaded to bleach his hair platinum, decided to make a book about them. A small book, in the shortest possible print run, to give to clients and friends. He titled it 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, with the final "d" missing from "Name," a typographical error in Julia's calligraphy that she allowed to stand and that the printer preserved. The book exists. It is almost certainly Andy Warhol's first self-published work and, for decades, the most documented trace of his life with cats.

Why they were all named Sam

The explanation most cited in biographies and interviews is also the simplest. Julia Warhola, a Rusyn Greek Catholic of Slovak origin, saw no point in inventing different names for so many similar animals. She called them all Sam. Andy accepted the maternal logic and turned it into a conceptual device when it came time to title the book. Among the few non-Sam cats that passed through the apartment, two exceptions are documented: Hester, a female that Warhol mentioned in later years in interviews with Bob Colacello, and the Blue Pussy of the title, a cat painted in deliberate blue wash in one of the final pages of the book as a visual break from the rest.

Victor Bockris, in The Life and Death of Andy Warhol (Bantam, 1989), reconstructs the origin of the Sams with some precision: most were street rescues brought by friends from Warhol's circle on the East Side of Manhattan. The founding litter started with two brothers, white with patches, rescued around 1949 or 1950. The population grew without restraint over several years. Bob Colacello, in Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (HarperCollins, 1990), describes the apartment as a floor crossed by cats at any hour, with a persistent feline smell and litter trays distributed through the rooms.

The book: technique, print run, dispersal

25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy was printed in 1954 using the technique Warhol had spent years developing in his commercial work: the blotted line. He drew in ink on one sheet, then pressed a second sheet against it before the ink dried. The transfer produced a broken, slightly unsteady line with an almost naive appearance that was distinctive of his graphic style in those years. The coloring was applied by hand, copy by copy, with aniline inks, with help from his mother and at least one assistant.

The original print run has been estimated between 190 and 200 copies, per the catalogue raisonné published by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The printer was Seymour Berlin, a Manhattan specialist in small artist editions. The book was never sold commercially. Warhol distributed it as a calling card to art directors at magazines, to clients in fashion and publishing, and to friends.

Decades later, surviving copies reached significant auction prices. Christie's sold a complete hand-colored copy in 2018 for a six-figure sum in US dollars; another copy came up in 2022 at comparable figures. The book's rarity and its anecdotal value as Warhol's first editorial step have made it a collector's object.

The cats: domestic shorthairs, no pedigree

The Sams were not purebred cats. They were domestic shorthairs, the most common cat in the United States in the 1950s and today. Short coat, variable color, medium build, adult weight between 8 and 12 lb, indoor lifespan with veterinary care of 13 to 17 years. The Cat Fanciers' Association (CFA) recognizes a related but distinct breed, the American Shorthair, which descends from working cats brought to North America by European settlers and is maintained under a closed pedigree standard. The Sams were not American Shorthairs in the CFA sense. They were ordinary New York cats that arrived from the street and stayed.

The lithographs in the book show a range consistent with that category: gray and black tabbies, a bicolor black-and-white, an orange tabby, two or three solid blacks. Hester, per written accounts, was a gray tabby female. The Blue Pussy of the title is most plausibly read as a gray cat rendered in deliberate excess of its actual color, a graphic decision rather than a breed description.

Warhol was not keeping Persians, Burmese, or the exotic breeds that were beginning to appear in Manhattan social circles in the 1950s. The Sams were street cats adopted as they came. The detail fits the biographical context. Warhol did not grow up in a wealthy household. The Warhola family came from Pittsburgh, of modest Slovak immigrant background, and the cats in the East 75th Street apartment were the domestic expression of the frugality his mother never stopped practicing.

The domestic shorthair as a cat

The domestic shorthair is, as a rule, the healthiest cat available for adoption. A genetically diverse population, with no controlled inbreeding, without the heritable conditions that run at elevated prevalence in closed pedigree breeds. The American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP) notes that mixed-breed cats are broadly healthy and adapt well to indoor life with routine veterinary care, environmental enrichment, and appropriate nutrition. Lifespans of 13 to 17 years indoors are documented, with cases above 20 in cats with complete veterinary follow-up. Grooming needs are low: short coat, weekly brushing sufficient, baths only when necessary. Tolerance for apartment life is reasonable, with adequate environmental enrichment: play sessions, a window with a view, scratching posts, daily active play time.

Warhol's life with cats after the Sams

Warhol moved in the late 1950s to a house on Lexington Avenue, where the cat population remained stable for several more years. When the Factory opened in 1962 on East 47th Street, cats receded from the public record of his work. The visual language of the Pop period built itself around Marilyn, Mao, Campbell's cans, Brillo boxes. The Sams became a private footnote.

Hester, the gray tabby female Warhol mentioned to Colacello in interviews during the 1970s, survived the move to Lexington Avenue and lived, per various accounts, into the late 1960s. She was the last cat documented by name in Warhol's environment. After Hester, mentions of cats in Warhol's published diaries (The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hackett editor, 1989) are occasional and always refer to animals belonging to friends.

Warhol died on February 22, 1987, in New York, following complications after routine gallbladder surgery. He was 58. He had no cats in his home at the time of his death. The townhouse on East 66th Street, where he had lived since 1974 with a monumental art collection, held no animals in his final years.

What is verifiable

Fact	Confirmation
Self-published book	25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy, Seymour Berlin, New York, 1954
Illustration technique	Blotted line with hand-applied aniline inks
Reason for the name Sam	Julia Warhola's decision (Bockris, 1989)
Named exception	Hester, a gray tabby female
Auction records	Christie's New York, 2018 and 2022, six-figure sums
Cat type	Domestic shorthairs, no pedigree

Why the story matters

Popular culture tends to associate Andy Warhol with the Velvet Underground, Edie Sedgwick, and the assembly-line production model of the Factory. The part involving more than twenty cats living with his mother in a small Upper East Side apartment rarely makes it into the major documentaries. The Sams carry, though, the signature of the most recognizable Warhol: serial repetition. Twenty-five cats sharing a single name, drawn with the same technique, hand-colored with only the shade varying, are already, before Pop Art, an exercise in visual serialization. The founding work of Warhol's career was not the Campbell's cans. It was his mother's cats.

One further detail is worth noting. Keeping twenty cats in a Manhattan apartment today would constitute grounds for an animal welfare complaint and a visit from city services. In the 1950s it was an eccentricity that the neighbors of the East Side tolerated. The specific practice, feeding fifteen or twenty unspayed and unneutered cats in an urban apartment without veterinary protocols or population management, is what we now call feline hoarding. Public awareness of animal welfare and cat health has advanced enough that the scene, viewed from 2026, reads more like a social services episode than a charming biographical detail. That does not diminish the book. It does qualify the nostalgia.