On Monday mornings you could see lipstick kisses on the window of a used bookstore downtown.

Bar girl kisses, in pinks and reds, left behind for Silas the bookstore cat.

Cinnamon Dokken, owner of A Novel Idea, would smile as she unlocked the door for business.

Silas, who lived in the store for nearly 14 years, basking in the love of bibliophiles, cat people and tipsy night owls, is gone from his perch in the store window.

Old and feeble and in pain, he was put to sleep Monday.

He wasn’t her cat, Dokken said Tuesday.

“Silas belonged to everybody, not just us.”

The black and white stray, found starving in the alley behind the store at 14th and P streets, moved in during the winter of 1995.

He never left.

He ruined telephones and clocks. Knocked the store’s credit card machine to the floor time and again, leaving a trail of receipt paper unspooling across the floor. He climbed shelves and cried when he couldn’t get down.

He didn’t meow. He meeped.

When a customer came in Silas said hello. Meep.

Sometimes he howled.

He lured customers to the nonfiction in the basement and when they took a seat to cozy up with a book, he’d jump into a lap and go to sleep.

He became a downtown icon.

People posed for pictures with Silas, a cat with so many friends he had a fan club, with T-shirts.

“He had a remarkable way of making people feel welcome,” said Dokken.

Joel Stuthman came in a couple times a week to get his Silas fix. He’d carry the cat through the aisles, let him drool on his arm.

“Silas was my favorite cat of all time,” said the photographer. “There was a lot of love in that cat.”

Silas was a bridge, helping the staff get to know their human customers better, said Dokken.

And last weekend, many of them came to tell him goodbye.

It was hard, and it was good.

“We’ve been telling a lot of stories about him,” the bookstore owner said.

“He was a magnificent cat.”

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.