Vintage Birthday Greeting Card with Anthropomorphic Cat and Books

The deeply unhinged cartoon cat—clad in a blue fuzzy sweater, whiskers akimbo, yellow paws dangling off the bottom of an enormous open book—has apparently spent a thousand literary lifetimes ransacking a towering stack of books (complete with a little oil lamp for maximum scholarly atmosphere) in search of birthday rhymes, and found exactly zero. The cat's expression reads less 'delightful bookworm' and more 'I have made terrible life choices and the lamp has witnessed everything.' Whoever decided that 'our friend is trapped in a Sisyphean hellscape of creative bankruptcy' was the correct emotional register for a birthday card was a visionary, a monster, or both.