The Verso Project: Bellois Tickletoes

This limited edition T-shirt is part of the first capsule collection of The Verso Project, an archival storytelling initiative from The New York Times Store that highlights rarely seen images from The Times’s archives. The shirt front features a highly detailed reproduction of a raw, unedited Times photo. The back of the shirt shows the reverse side of the print, also known as the verso, mirroring the physical photograph and telling the story of its usage through hasty annotations and glued on newspaper clippings.

From image selection to T-shirt color (transfer paper blue, a reference to the reproduction techniques of yore), every element in this capsule collection is highly considered. They are hand-printed by Philadelphia Printworks, a Black-owned, socially conscious heritage brand and screen-printing workshop inspired by past and present social equity movements. Shirts from The Verso Project are limited edition and single run. Once they sell out, they will not be produced or made available for sale again.

On Jan. 12, 1935, The Times reported on the annual Atlantic Cat Club show and its impressive winners. Getting right to the point, the article’s subhead asserts, “Silver Frills, Lavender Chu Chu and Others Get High Awards Over Plebes.” Impressive enough to earn herself a large photo accompanying the article was Bellois Tickletoes, who won a blue ribbon among the tortoiseshell cats. This winner is photographed staring, entranced, into the camera, her beauty and mystique enhanced by the tiny top hat perched on one of her ears, which she clearly loves wearing.