Every day for the last five or so years a fluffy creature has greeted librarians of Ceredigion Library in Aberystwyth.

Tebot is the first paw in and the last paw to clock out each day, running the library on a tight paw.

According to staff, the small black and white patched cat spends her days patrolling the shelves across all three departments of the building, taking up her duties of catnaps on cushions across the library, the day centre on the ground floor and even the archives above.

Every Saturday she takes up shift on the council desk, vacant on weekends, holding a private therapy practice with visitors- though she is yet to get her therapy cat license.

A staff member of the library in the old Town Hall said: “She’s here right now!

“She’s here everyday - we think she lives down the road, the library is her second residence.

“She comes in and finds a quiet corner to sleep.

“She is very well loved by the staff, she has free roam of the building and gets treats from all three departments.”

They say she arrived just before the Covid-19 lockdown, making her residence at the building at least five years long.

The staff say she owns the library, that “it’s her personal library and we’re her private librarians”.

Her job, though unofficial, is to “keep people happy and smiling” which she does by accepting fuss whenever she’s passed and sitting on readers laps.

Though she doesn’t just work a nine to five, also coming in for special events including the Aberystwyth Poetry Festival which took place earlier this month - a professional photographer snapped her warming attendees laps.

Diplomatic, she has “a relationship with every level of the building”.

Between the cushions she’s supplied with to curl up on to the treats given across all three departments, the gently ageing cat has the council library wrapped around her little paw and her owners don’t seem to mind either.

Tebot (the Welsh word for teapot) is a bit of a rule breaker, however.

A Facebook post by the library last year confirmed that the building is Tebot’s second residence but that “no animals are allowed in the Library except for Guide/Assistance Dog and Tebot” - a blow for all the biblio and cat-o-philes in the area.

But Tebot’s arrangement isn’t a modern one - in fact, she’s continuing a tradition that dates back to the Egyptians according to some.

Cats in libraries have had an assumed symbiotic relationship since librarians of ancient Egypt, also documented in the Middle Ages in monasteries where religious texts built up and needed to be kept rodent-free.

Though library cat numbers have dwindled (though an official count has never been recorded for some unknown reason), cats like Tebot remain and some go down in history - such as the cat that outlasted the councilman who wanted him gone from a library in Texas, and a University of Edinburgh library cat who became immortalised after a book was written about him - The Library Cat.