Kansas City Kitty Dream Book (LOTTERY NUMBER PLAY, "Your Grandma's Original and Favorite Dream Book")

Kansas City Kitty Dream Book by Kansas City Kitty (pseudonym) Orig. pub. circa 1930s; this is a facsimile reprint. 128 pages, saddle-stitched booklet. The Kansas City Kitty Dream Book features an interesting cover depicting a kitten with seven ribbon-strung keys. Each key bears a number. Sections inside the book include a 1 page introduction, 12 pages of birthday horoscope numbers, 88 pages of dream keywords, 14 pages of women's names, and 12 pages of men's names. There are no interpretations for the dreams, just sets of number picks in the following format: 457 - Lottery - 799 4-11-44 The real name of the person who wrote the Kansas City Kitty Dream Book is not known, nor is the book's original publication date available. The closest we can come to determining its construction is that, according to the current publisher, Andres Visnapuu of Eagle Supply Co. (interviewed by Anthony Shafton in 1995) Ralph Anderson, the founder of Eagle Supply, purchased the rights to publish the Kansas City Kitty Dream Book from the book's author during the mid 1960s, before Visnapuu joined the company. Visnapuu recalls that the writer of the book was from Columbus, Ohio, and was probably a black man. What sets this dream book apart from others is the cute artwork on the covers and internal pages -- Rev. I. Doolittle says: "Brethren and Sisters, If ... you MUST play 'em, BOX 'EM."! The art work is unsigned and the artist's name, like the author's, is unknown (and, of course, they may both be one and the same person). Whoever made the pen-and-ink drawings was seemingly an amateur artist working under the strong aesthetic influences of Leslie Rogers and Jay Jackson, two prominent African American cartoonists of the time period. This adds weight to Andres Visnapuu's contention that the author was black, for there would have been few white amateur cartoonists of the era who would have copied the styles of Rogers and Jackson.