The above editorial appeared in The New York Times on Dec. 19, 1983. We are grateful to Valerie Saint-Rossy of Brooklyn for clipping and saving this small gem when it first appeared in print, and then, more recently, sharing it with all of us. Cheerio my deario!

 Second in a video series. Scroll down for a link to the video.

Archy the cockroach was the embodiment of reincarnation — he had been a poet in a past life, after all, and spent his insect days tapping out verse on a typewriter. So it’s entirely within reason to speculate who might be the reincarnation today of Don Marquis.

My vote would be for Dave Barry. Like Marquis, Barry was one of the most celebrated newspaper columnists of his era, using humor to shine a spotlight on the human condition. He wrote weekly columns in The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005 that were devastatingly funny, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988 for “his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.” Like Marquis, he has continued writing humor to great effect after leaving the grind of newspaper journalism, with 37 books to his name at last count.

The New York Times has called Barry “the funniest man in America.” The novelist Stephen King put it another way, declaring, “While reading Dave Barry’s ‘Big Trouble’ (Putnam, 1999), I laughed so loud I fell out of a chair. Luckily, there’s a rug, so I didn’t hurt myself.” On a personal level, one of Barry’s column’s from 1985 reduces this writer to disabling fits of laughter even today, after dozens of readings. It is titled “Ask Mr. Manners” and attempts to prepare a young parent for all the horrifying atrocities in store when hosting a birthday party for a preschool child. Popular themes for a young boy’s party, according to Barry, include action figures such as He-Man, G.I. Joe, The A-Team and the always-popular “Testosterone Bob’s Hurt Patrol.”  

When he was asked to recite a few lines from “archy and mehitabel,” Barry chose an excerpt from one of the funniest distillations of humor ever put onto paper: “certain maxims of archy.” His video is short and sweet. It is the second in a series of self-made videos on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Archy and Mehitabel’s first appearance in print, on March 29, 1916 — a yearlong celebration called archyFest.

Thank you, Dave Barry!

Here is his video: 

These videos were conceived by John Batteiger, creator of DonMarquis.com, and edited by Brandon Cuicchi. We are asking a variety of public figures to take a video of themselves reading a selection from one of Marquis’s “archy” books, using a cellphone camera or other simple video recorder. Our goal: “One take, no big production, all for fun.” We plan to present a new video every week (or so) through the end of 2016. If you or someone you know would be interested in recording a video, please contact Batteiger by email at johnbatt (at) me.com.

Next week: Calvin Trillin!

 First in a video series. Scroll down for a link to the video.

Novelist and comic-book writer Neil Gaiman counts Don Marquis’s “archy and mehitabel” among his favorite books. One of his top five, in fact. 

Gaiman has mentioned Marquis in several interviews over the years, and he included Marquis in a rambling and fabulous statement of beliefs in his blockbuster 2001 novel, “American Gods,” in which one of the main characters, Samantha Black Crow, declares, in part: “I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.”

Gaiman first read “archy and mehitabel” many years ago, and it continues to fascinate him. In a 2011 Australian radio broadcast, he included it in a discussion of his five most favorite books.

“Don Marquis was an American humorist and occasional poet and newspaper journalist, and he created Archy and Mehitabel,” Gaiman said on The Book Show, aired by ABC Radio National. “Archy was a free-verse poet who, for the crime of being a free-verse poet, was condemned to be a cockroach forevermore, in every future life, and he is a cockroach who writes poems by climbing on a typewriter and jumping head-first onto the keys. And Mehitabel is an alley cat who claims to have once been Cleopatra, and Don Marquis wrote these beautiful, funny, strange, mocking, glorious little poems about Archy and Mehitabel.”

Gaiman has won numerous international awards for his fantasy writing, including Carnegie and Newberry medals, so who better to lead off a video series featuring the wit and wisdom of a world-weary cockroach and a dissolute alley cat?

A few months ago, Gaiman was one of several writers, entertainers and other public figures asked to recite a few lines from one of the Archy and Mehitabel compilations (there are six) for a series of short, homemade videos on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Archy and Mehitabel’s first appearance in print, on March 29, 1916 — part of a yearlong celebration called archyFest. Gaiman responded to the call immediately and enthusiastically, and the video below is the result.

Given the choice to read any of more that 300 published sketches and poems, Gaiman chose an obscure but brilliant sketch, “quote buns by great men quote,” from the 1927 book that started it all, “archy and mehitabel.” He explains:

I don’t know if this is my favorite of the Archy and Mehitabel poems. I do know that I fell in love with it before I actually understood what it meant. When I was a boy at school, a ‘bun’ was a large, doughy bread roll with raisins in it that you’d be given at four o’clock at school, and it was many, many years before I discovered that a bun was also 1920s slang — for a hangover. 

Here is the video:

These videos were conceived by John Batteiger, creator of DonMarquis.com, and edited by Brandon Cuicchi. We are asking a variety of public figures to take a video of themselves reading a selection from one of Marquis’s “archy” books, using a cellphone camera or other simple video recorder. Our goal: “One take, no big production, all for fun.” We plan to present a new video every week (or so) through the end of 2016. If you or someone you know would be interested in recording a video, please contact Batteiger by email at johnbatt (at) me.com.

And thanks to Neil Gaiman for his gracious help and support!

Next week: Dave Barry!

It was 100 years ago, on March 20, 1916, that Don Marquis added a fanciful bit of filler material to his daily newspaper column in The Evening Sun. He claimed that a cockroach had crawled onto his typewriter the night before and left a message by diving on the keys, one at a time. Many more messages would follow from the labors of Archy the cockroach, including wild tales of a neighborhood alley cat, Mehitabel. It was brilliant stuff, and it’s still with us today. Let’s celebrate!

Plans in New York City include performances of actor Gale McNeeley’s one-man show, “Archy and Mehitabel”; a walking tour of New York’s old Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27; and a special gathering of Marquis fans on the evening of Tuesday, March 29, at Jimmy’s No. 43, a bar/restaurant in the East Village, where tales will be told, Archy poems will be sung, and toasts will be raised to Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel.

Further events and exhibits will take place throughout 2016, all under the banner of archyFest! See below for event details:

GALE MCNEELEY’S ‘ARCHY AND MEHITABEL’

Gale has entertained audiences across the country with his “Archy and Mehitabel” show and is coming to New York from his home in Southern California. He will perform Sunday, March 20, at the West Hempstead Public Library on Long Island; Wednesday, March 23, at the Jericho Public Library on Long Island; Thursday, March 24, at the North Shore Public Library on Long Island;
Monday, March 28, at the New York Public Library’s Mid-Manhattan Library; and Saturday, April 2, at the Forest Hills Library in Queens.

For more information, visit Gale’s website at www.galemcneeley.com.

DON MARQUIS WALKING TOUR

Please join us for a walking tour of Don Marquis’s old haunts along New York’s Newspaper Row on Sunday, March 27. Newspaper Row includes Park Row and the area surrounding New York City Hall in Lower Manhattan. We will visit the sites of the old Sun and New York Tribune offices on Nassau Street; the building where Don created Archy and Mehitabel; the former New York Times building, where Don was a regular at the tavern in the basement; and the last home of The Sun, which is still flanked by an ancient brass clock and a thermometer bearing the Sun motto, “It Shines for All.”

The walk (very easy) starts at noon and will take about an hour, and it will end with a drink and a toast to Don at a nearby tavern. Please meet at the Benjamin Franklin statue at the intersection of Park Row and Nassau and Spruce streets. The walk will be led by John Batteiger, creator of the DonMarquis.com website and the Don Marquis page on Facebook. There is no charge for the walk, but Batteiger won’t complain if you insist on tipping him. 

Reservations are encouraged. Please send email to johnbatt@me.com.

ARCHY’S 100TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

We have reserved the back room at Jimmy’s No. 43 on the evening of Tuesday, March 29. The address is 43 East 7th Street (downstairs), between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, down the street from McSorely’s Old Ale House. We will gather in the bar area after 8 p.m. and move into the back room at 9. 

Your host, John Batteiger, has been digging up arcane facts about Don Marquis and Archy and Mehitabel for 20 years, and he will do his best to keep his fascinating and laugh-filled anecdotes as brief as possible (no promises!). With any luck he will have laryngitis, and we can quickly move along to snippets of Gale McNeeley’s “Archy and Mehitabel” show and a selection of Archy poems and sketches performed by Kathy Biehl and Seth Sheldon, stars in the upcoming New York production of the Marx Brothers musical “I’ll Say She Is.”

Did you say “party favors”? Sure, we’ll have some! And good times, too. Please join us! There will be no cover charge for the event, but we will pass around a hat if all goes well. There is a cash bar, and Jimmy’s offers a full restaurant menu. Reservations are not required, but they are requested so we can get a ballpark head count. Send email to John Batteiger at johnbatt@me.com. When all else fails, call him at 415-515-6174.

As Mehitabel says, “Cheerio my dearios!”

The New York Times today printed obituaries for two women whose lives could not have been more dissimilar.

Janet Wolfe, 101, was a New York socialite, “gleeful gadabout” and friend to some of the most powerful and creative men of the last century. Federico Fellini made passes at her, The Times noted, and Orson Welles sawed her in half in a magic show. Holly Woodlawn, 69, was a transgender actress who starred in Andy Warhol’s 1970 underground film “Trash” and was the inspiration for Lou Reed’s epic ballad “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Wolfe and Woodlawn had little in common except a rebellious spirit, bold and unstoppable, and a determination to wring every bit of life out of their time on this planet. So it’s no surprise that The Times has compared both women to Mehitabel, the brassy, bawdy alley cat whose adventures were captured in Don Marquis’s classic 1927 collection of tall tales and light verse, “archy and mehitabel.” The comparisons span many decades but are nonetheless fresh.

The Times’ Margalit Fox, in her obituary of Wolfe, wrote that to be in her presence “was to find oneself enveloped by an amiable hurricane, equal parts Holly Golightly, Auntie Mame and Mehitabel, the dowager cat at the center of ‘Archy and Mehitabel,’ Don Marquis’s celebrated World War I-era column in The Evening Sun.

“ ‘Toujours gai’ — ‘Always cheerful’ — Mehitabel would declare in her dotage; ‘there’s a dance in the old dame yet.’ (Ms. Wolfe, in fact, was drawn to strays: If she found a kitten on the street she might well take it to Schrafft’s for a bite.)”

Fox’s analogy was perfect. So too was a comparison of Woodlawn and Mehitabel in a 1971 Times review of the animated film “Shinbone Alley,” by Vincent Canby. Mehitabel, Canby wrote, was “a toujours gai old dame with the soul of Cleopatra, the airs of Emma Bovary, the artistic longings of Isadora Duncan, the hangovers of Dorothy Parker’s Big Blonde, and the sexual resolve of “Trash’s” Holly Woodlawn.”

Don Marquis first wrote about Mehitabel in 1916. Nearly a century later, it’s remarkable to see that Mehitabel remains a touchstone for women such as Wolfe and Woodlawn — brave, unrelenting and thoroughly fascinating. The world needs more of them.

(Icing on the cake: Fox’s obituary of Wolfe included a link to this website’s Archy and Mehitabel page. Thanks!)

George Herriman’s drawings of Archy and Mehitabel brilliantly capture the spirit of their subjects: the inquisitive cockroach and the sassy, brassy alleycat. To many most readers, the drawings are as much a part of Archy and Mehitabel’s charm as Don Marquis’s stories about them.

But Herriman was just one of many artists to capture their magic. Edward Gorey drew Archy and Mehitabel, and so did cartoonists at The New Yorker and Collier’s magazines. Animators drew them in a feature film, and artists today continue to draw inspiration from cockroach and cat.

Here is a look at Archy the cockroach through the eyes and pens and pencils of 10 artists, drawn over the course of nine decades. Scroll further down the page for an up-close look at each of the images. And look for drawings of Mehitabel in a future post.

Click on the thumbnail images below for full-size views:

The very first image of Archy appeared in the New York Tribune on September 11, 1922. The was the day Don Marquis joined the Tribune as its star columnist, and the newspaper took out half-page advertisements in rival dailies, including The New York Times, to brag about its new hire. Marquis had created Archy six years earlier at The Evening Sun and would remain at the Tribune until 1925.

This image accompanied a retelling of Don’s classic story “the lesson of the moth” that ran in Collier’s magazine on June 5, 1926. After Don left the Tribune, he had a weekly column in Collier’s titled “If You Know What I Mean” that ran for one year. Archy, of course, made regular appearances in it. His story of the moth willing to fry himself on a lightbulb was a repeat; it had previously appeared in The Sun in 1922.

The book “archly and mehitabel” had been in print for three years when, in 1930, Don’s publisher, Doubleday Doran, asked what he thought about a new edition with illustrations by George Herriman, who was well on his way to achieving cult status with his weirdly brilliant newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. Don replied that if it would boost sales, he was all for it. It did, and the rest, as they say, is history. (For more on Herriman and the dust jackets he created for Marquis’s books, check out this recent blog post.)

Collier’s magazine published many of Don’s short stories and poems throughout the 1920s and ’30s, and this image of Archy scuttling away from a tin of insect repellant was part of a rhyming alphabet by Don that appeared in the July 22, 1933, issue.  The alphabet is tremendously funny, and begins, naturally, with the letter A: “a is for Archy, which becomes / a synonym for roaches / an archy neither stings nor hums / but subtly he encroaches / some persons heed him and cry louder / others reach for the insect powder.” View the complete poem here.

This squib appeared in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column on January 14, 1950, accompanying a story on the death of The Sun newspaper. The magazine noted bitterly that in all the obituaries published by other newspapers, “there was only one mention of the most distinguished Sun man of them all, Don Marquis. The fact that the Sun office was the place where the lower-case Archy, the bug with the soul of a poet, subsisted on stale paste and apple parings and performed his nightly labors on the typewriter keys proved not worth a passing notice. Ah welladay!”

Archy came back to life, gloriously, in 1970 with the release of “Shinbone Alley,” a feature-length animated movie directed by John D. Wilson. It was based on a 1957 Broadway musical of the same, and it featured the voices of Carol Channing as Mehitabel, Eddie Bracken as Archy, and Alan Reed Sr. (“Fred Flintstone”) as Mehitabel’s tomcat boyfriend, Big Bill. It’s an enjoyable movie, with tuneful music and animation nothing like the standard Disney fare of that time.

Any literary character would be thrilled beyond words to be drawn by a master craftsman such as George Herriman, but Archy has the distinction of being drawn by two of the greatest illustrators of the 20th century. That second honor came with the release of the October 1986 issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured a four-page spread of “lost” Archy stories illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Those lost stories mentioned above had been found by one Jeff Adams, who purchased the contents of an abandoned trunk of Marquis papers. Ten years after the Atlantic spread, Adams published a more robust collection of Archy stories that had never been included it books before. This new book was “archyology,” and it features a new set of illustrations by illustrator and New Yorker cartoonist Ed Frascino. More stories, and drawings followed in 1998 with “archyology ii.”

Some years back, a fortuitous mix of Google search terms revealed a webpage featuring the art of Paul Hosteler, an illustrator in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had posted several pages of unfinished sketches, including one from 2009 with drawings of Archy as a smart, sophisticated cockroach dude — wise and a bit world-weary. This is one of those sketches. Here is a link to Hostetler’s Facebook page.

Another lucky Google search uncovered the art of Isaac Cates, editor of Cartozia Tales, a clever magazine featuring stories by independent cartoonists. (And, oh yeah, Cates is also a Ph.D. poetry and writing lecturer at the University of Vermont). This image of Archy was part of an alphabet drawn in 2012 for his Satisfactory Comics blog.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here are 10,000 that say Archy is alive and well as his 100th birthday approaches in March 2016 (see my archyFest! page). In fact, Archy has never looked better!

Archy the cockroach has reappeared quite a few times in newspapers, magazines and blog posts in the decades after Don Marquis’s death. Check out this classic scene, drawn by the ace New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti in 1973:

Barsotti was one of the most prolific and best-loved of The New Yorker’s stable of cartoonists. He drew 1,400 cartoons for The New Yorker, from the 1960s until his death in 2014, and was famous for simple line drawings of dogs and kings, outlaw snails and talking pasta. Here’s an appreciation, with lots of classic images, from the magazine’s cartoon editor.

Without comment (except to note the errant spelling of “archy”), we reprint an article that appeared in The New York Times on January 3, 1938. Don Marquis had died at his home in Forest Hills, Queens, just five days earlier.

Note: Location update!

If you will be anywhere close to Boston this weekend, be sure to see the Blunderwood Portable typewriter in the Rose Kennedy Greenway. It’s a massive art installation on display Saturday and Sunday, part of Boston’s Figment Festival. Look for it where High Street intersects with the Greenway, northeast of South Station.

The Blunderwood, a 24:1 scale 1927 typewriter measuring 20 feet square and 8 feet tall, is an homage to Don Marquis’ Archy the cockroach.

Much like Archy, who dove head-first on the keys of Don’s typewriter to tell his stories, visitors to the Blunderwood will be able to walk on huge typewriter keys and see their own messages projected on an overhead screen made to look like an oversize sheet of typing paper. Several of Archy’s poems will also be projected. 

The Blunderwood is the work of Jason Turgeon and a team of artists calling themselves the Cat and the Cockroach Collective. After the Figment Festival, the typewriter will be carted off to Burning Man in the Nevada desert. Check out a previous blog post on the Blunderwood project, as well as Jason’s website and the Blunderwood Facebook page. See you in Boston!

170 Nassau Street: “Vermin Castle.”

Here’s a thought that might keep you up at night: The real, live descendants of Archy the cockroach may be scurrying around the streets and alleyways and high-priced real estate of lower Manhattan at this very moment.

That’s right, Archy, the most famous insect in American literature, was based on a cockroach that once was very much alive. His home was in the newsroom of the old Evening Sun newspaper, but his real name was Erasmus, not Archy. Don Marquis revealed Archy’s origins and commented on his enduring appeal — and his frequent reincarnations — in an essay he wrote in 1934 for The Cornell Daily Sun, the student newspaper at Cornell University.

“Archy crawled into my life about twenty years ago, when I was doing a daily column on the New York Evening Sun,” Don wrote. “There was a story in the news columns about a garage up town somewhere that was haunted, . . . the type-writer in the garage office would keep clicking of nights, when no one was in there. So they thought it was a ghost, which is about what a lot of garage loafers would think. It didn’t occur to any of them to put a sheet of paper in the machine and give the ghost a chance to have his say. One night they found a mouse running back and forth on the keyboard; he was the ghost. 

“Why not (says I to myself) both a mouse and a ghost? A mouse inhabited by a ghost? A mouse into whose little carcass a ghost has insinuated its way? A case of transmigration? Some of the old Doc Pythagoras stuff? So I sat down and wrote what the mouse-ghost was trying to get across. Then I thought, No; a mouse isn’t good enough. Then I remembered a cock-roach I knew; a cock-roach named Erasmus, who lived behind the water cooler in the Sun news room. Erasmus was a very learned-looking cock-roach and used to crawl out from behind the cooler, when you went to take a drink of water, rear up on three or four of his hind legs, and look you over with an immense scorn, the scorn of a pundit, the scorn of a philosopher, and then back away again, leaving with you a sense of your own inferiority. But Erasmus wasn’t a good enough name for my cockroach; I made him Archy, which is a kind of peppy name, and yet ingenuous, somehow: easy to say and easy to remember.

“Archy soon developed a friendship with all the mice, rats, spiders, and other small deer, who hang around a big old building; and finally Mehitabel came along and joined the throng, ‘so many, and so many and so full of glee.’ (Class in English, look that quotation up. What! Great guns, that isn’t from Keats’ Endymion, is it? Read the whole poem and get your mind away from trash like Archy and Mehitabel.)

“The stuff caught on at once largely because of its typographical appearance. It has always been easy to do, because I never do it when I don’t feel like it. I never think when I do it, and I never plan it. There is some sort of queer vitality in it which I don’t understand myself. After I had been doing it nearly every day for a year, I got terribly tired of it, and killed Archy off; stepped on him and squashed him with the big flat foot of authority. I was surprised at the number of letters I got, after I announced his death, protesting. That showed me I had something which people wanted, for some queer reason, or for no reason, and I resurrected him. I killed him four or five times during the next ten years , but there was always a demand for his resurrection. This was easy enough to manage. All I had to do was have the soul of Archy  — the real Archy, the essential Archy — crawl into the body of another cockroach, and carry on, which he could do without missing a strophe. It was a great joke for five or six years, and one which the inspired jesters never seemed to weary of, to send me by mail dead Arches in little pill-boxes, — I get them from Maine, California, the Canal Zone, the Philippine Islands; from all over the infested world.”

*  *  *

Don barely changed any of the facts in his now-famous introduction to Archy, first published in his Sun Dial column on March 29, 1916, in The Evening Sun and reprinted in “archy and mehitabel” in 1927: 

“Dobbs Ferry possesses a rat which slips out of his lair at night and runs a typewriting machine in a garage. Unfortunately, he has always been interrupted by the watchman before he could produce a complete story. It was at first thought that the power which made the typewriter run was a ghost, in stead of a rat. It seems likely to us that it was both a ghost and a rat. . . . And since this matter has been reported in the public prints and seriously received we are no longer afraid of being ridiculed, and we do not mind making a statement of something that happened to our own typewriter only a couple of weeks ago.

“We came into our room earlier than usual in the morning and discovered a gigantic cockroach jumping about upon the keys. . . .”

*  *  *

The American Tract Society Building, left, and the former New York Times building.

There is one more story that deserves to be told. The building where Don created his Archy character still stands, at 150 Nassau Street, but the home of Erasmus is long gone. That site today is the northeast corner of Pace University’s administration building at 1 Pace Plaza, although the address is known in history books as 170 Nassau Street.

Located across Park Row from New York City Hall, at Frankfort Street, the five-story brick building at 170 Nassau once was the home of Tammany Hall, the powerful political machine ruled by the infamous Boss Tweed. It was built in 1811 and had been home to The Sun and Evening Sun since 1868. However, by 1912, when Don joined the Evening Sun staff, it was decrepit and crumbling. Don’s good friend Christopher Morley, writing in his 1918 book “Shandygaff,” called it “Vermin Castle,” and he identified it as Archy’s birthplace.

In fact, Archy was born a block away. In July 1915 the Sun newspapers moved from 170 to 150 Nassau, at the southeast corner of Spruce Street, in the former home of the American Tract Society, a publisher of religious books and pamphlets. Erasmus was presumably left behind, and the old Tammany Hall was demolished that fall. But Don carried the memory of old Erasmus with him to 150 Nassau where, less than a year later, he gave him new life as Archy.

280 Broadway: “It shines for all.”

Marquis and the Sun newspapers would move again, in 1919, across City Hall Park to 280 Broadway, formerly the home of the historic A.T. Stewart Dry Goods Store. The building is still identified by a four-sided clock and a two-sided thermometer attached to the front facade, both announcing The Sun’s storied motto: “It shines for all.” This is the building that E.B. White wrote about in his classic 1949 book “Here is New York”:

“I’ve been remembering what it felt like as a young man to live in the same town with giants. When I first arrived in New York my personal giants were a dozen or so columnists and critics and poets whose names appeared regularly in the papers. I burned with a low steady fever just because I was on the same island with Don Marquis, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley, Franklin P. Adams, Robert C. Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Ring Lardner and Stephen Vincent Benet. I would hang around the corner of Chambers Street and Broadway, thinking: ‘Somewhere in that building is the typewriter that archy the cockroach jumps on at night.’ “

Today, both 280 Broadway and the old American Tract Society Building are recognized as New York architectural landmarks. The former is a now a city government office building; the latter is a luxury condominium complex where, one presumes, its notoriety as the birthplace of a literate cockroach is not mentioned to prospective tenants.

Newspaper Row, circa 1915: City Hall and the Municipal Building are at left. A golden dome sits atop the World Building, later torn down to widen the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. To the right, the old Sun Building is dwarfed by the Tribune Tower, both now the site of 1 Pace Plaza, and the American Tract Society Building peeks out from behind the old Times Building.