Aside from a brief episode in August 1989, when he escaped and went missing for almost a week after a janitor left a side door open at night, Dewey spent the remainder of his life in the library. Readmore, although he was usually referred to as just 'Dewey'. The librarians added 'Readmore Books' to his full name, inspired partially by the cartoon library cat Cap'n O. Ī contest to name the cat received nearly 400 entries, the majority of which supported retaining the name 'Dewey'. The library decided to keep him as a library cat and his story first received publicity in the Spencer Daily Reporter a week after his discovery.

Myron nursed the cat, which was suffering from frostbite, back to health and named him Dewey, after Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal library classification system. On January 18, 1988, Vicki Myron, a librarian at the Spencer Public Library, discovered an eight-week-old male kitten that had been left in the library's drop box the previous night. Myron adapted it for two children's versions, wrote the sequel Dewey's Nine Lives (2010), and published a third children's book, Dewey's Christmas at the Library. Dewey's caretaker, head librarian Vicki Myron, published a book on Dewey's life in 2008, entitled Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, which became a New York Times number-one nonfiction bestseller which was translated into numerous languages.

His story became so well known that, after his death in November 2006, his obituary was featured in more than 270 newspapers worldwide. His fame soon grew nationally, then internationally, and he was featured in a variety of mediums, including Paul Harvey's radio program The Rest of the Story and a Japanese documentary about cats. Having been abandoned in the library's drop box in January 1988, he was adopted by the library and gained local attention for his story shortly thereafter. Dewey Readmore Books (Novem– November 29, 2006) was the library cat of the Spencer, Iowa, Public Library.

Dewey the small town library cat