archyology ii (the final dig): the long lost tales of archy and mehitabel
In this second and final volume "composed" by archy, the literary cockroach, the wonderfully whimsical insect and his fractious feline friend, mehitabel, engage in misadventures large and small and comment with quirky accuracy on the common state of humanity. Previously unpublished in book form and literally recovered from a steamer trunk by editor Jeff Adams, these stories are the product of Don Marquis, a New York columnist and raconteur who was one of America's most popular humorists...
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The new—and final—adventures of archy the cockroach sage and his zany but lovable entourage.archy is more peripatetic than usual in these books - he moves away from his old haunts in New York in order to observe the strange goings on in Paris, though with that same jaundiced eye . . . Marquis's gifts as a comic satirist have often been written about. Less has been said about the fact that he was also tilting at the excesses of American writers of bad free verse when he had archy write in the way that he did . . . [he created] two of America's most enduring comic characters.
prefaceconsider1the inventors toothpick2open spaces8The Great False Teeth Mystery11a letter from mehitabel19archy comes out for simplified spelling23archys own short course on entomology25The Great False Teeth Mystery27archy visits washington33archy the insider35all for brevier37archyology38The Great False Teeth Mystery, or All For Love's Sake39archy del puerto rico45hark47in a stew48the burning question50the thing to do51The Great False Teeth Mystery: Wedded and Parted57please no rain64a seaside spectacle66archy declares neutrality68The Great False Teeth Mystery, or The Bolshevist's Bride71archy interjects78archy afloat79archy to the radio fans80tossing with a porpoise81back with a message83The Great False Teeth Mystery, or Broken Vows85waxing poetic91thanks boss93archy gets historical94archy remembers96The Great False Teeth Mystery, or Wooed and Descried99archy saves the fleet104eating for arts sake107The Great False Teeth Mystery109archy still treats em rough112meter reading115sport to you116archy says117a final thought120
\ From the Publisher"archy is more peripatetic than usual in these books--he moves away from his old haunts in New York in order to observe the strange goings on in Paris, though with that same jaundiced eye...Marquis's gifts as a comic satirist have often been written about. Less has been said about the fact that he was also tilting at the excesses of American writers of bad free verse when he had archy write in the way that he did...[he created] two of America's most enduring comic characters." --The Economist\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsA slender final posthumous collection of vers libre by the most famous cockroach in American letters. Though editor Adams's scant Preface doesn't date any of the individual poems, at least one of them, in which archy stops a German U-boat from sinking an American fleet carrying wartime supplies to France, can be dated almost to the literary cockroach's debut in 1916. Others—archy visits the insects in Washington, archy goes on strike until Marquis (his "boss") changes his typeface, archy fends off the advances of jennie the cockroach—could have been written yesterday. Marquis's eye for humbug, and his ear for nonsense, achieve a comic sublimity in "the inventor's toothpick" (archy suddenly finds himself laden with a minute but lethal dose of high explosives) and "archy comes out for simplified spelling" (in which the cause finds its logical champion: a writer who perforce dispenses with capitalization and punctuation, and whose own terseness is explained by the effort it takes to leap from key to key of the typewriter). Three reservations: (1) Marquis's satires of the Ku Klux Klan (variously called"the ku klux klam" and "the krew krux krank") are toothless; (2) nearly half the book is devoted to "The Great False Teeth Mystery," whose burlesque of serial conventions, though often antically funny (its non-sequitur installments are mainly variations on the challenge of writing a cockroach detective and a set of bejewelled false teeth into the same story), is best consumed in small doses; and (3) archy's friend mehitabel, the cat who claims to be an incarnation of Cleopatra, appears more frequently in Frascino's 36 line drawings than in archy's poems. Despite the thinness,though, any new book from archy is better than no cockroach poetry at all.\ \
