Ellis Parker Butler, Reina Marquis (holding a copy of “Danny’s Own Story”) and Don Marquis.

The 1912 publication of Don Marquis’ first book, the novel “Danny’s Own Story,” created a stir in literary circles. Doubleday, Page & Co., Don’s publisher, heralded the young writer as a rising star, and reviewers favorably compared him with Mark Twain, who had died less than two year earlier. (It didn’t hurt that “Danny’s Own Story” bore a passing resemblance to “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Both were written in a backwoods vernacular and both used wry humor to tell the adventures of young boys, one an orphan and the other nearly so, who ran away from home and lived by their wits.)

Don wrote “Danny” while on the staff of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but he moved to The Evening Sun just before its publication on January 17, 1912. To celebrate the new book, Doubleday hosted a reception a few weeks later at its headquarters in Garden City, Long Island, and among the guests was Ellis Parker Butler, a well-known humor writer at the time whose best-known work, the short story “Pigs Is Pigs,” had been published six years earlier.

At one point during the festivities a Doubleday photographer asked Don and his wife, Reina, to pose with Butler. No one at the time paid attention to an alarm clock sitting on a bookshelf directly above Don’s head, but when the photograph was developed the clock was gone — its glass face wiped out by glare from the camera’s flash. In its place, it looked for all the world as if an angel had come down from heaven and anointed Marquis with a halo.

Doubleday sent copies of the photograph to both Butler and Marquis, and a short time later it reported their separate responses in a statement it gleefully released to newspapers across North America. The following exchange was published in the March 2, 1912, editions of The Toronto World, with comments first from Butler, then Marquis.

*  *  *

I have received the photograph entitled “The Mephistophelian Waiter, the Lady and the Saint,” and have looked at it. I have only one complaint to make.

God — and my forefathers — are doubtless to blame for my face, and my tailor for my clothes, and my willing facial muscles for my satanic grin, but why, oh! why did you sneak my halo away from me and hang it over Don Marquis’s mussy hair? Any one can see that my 6 1/4 halo is a misfit on his 7 3/4 head. It looks like a cheap hand mirror when he wears it, or like a bright, but small thought lost in his hair jungle.

I am sorry this happened. I don’t like to lend my halo to anyone, and when I pose with a beatific smile, and with my glossy hair and glossy face all prepared to reflect the shining rays of my halo, and then find the halo has been sneaked away from me and stuck on another man, on whom it is a misfit, I am pained, yes, by golly, I am pained.

Yours,
Ellis Parker Butler.

*  *  *

Thank you for the picture.

That is a halo. It hasn’t anything to do with genius (if any) but denotes virtue.

I am sorry that you have started this alarm clock theory. I can see no evidences of an alarm clock myself.

But on the contrary it has always been known in my family, and among my close friends, that I had a halo. When I was a kid at school the teachers used to notice it. Where the customary stunt was to show your sore toe for a bite of an apple, I always showed my halo to the other boys. As I grew older, and began to take the girls home from church sociables and spelling bees, it got to be a nuisance, however; it would shine over the hammock on the darkest summer evening. Of course it was a comfort to any parent to know that the young man sitting in the hammock with her daughter was a young man who had a halo; but it was inconvenient for me, at times; I never could get any privacy; other boys could steal watermelons, for instance; but I was always doomed to virtue; my halo marked me; but for that I might have been a successful chicken thief. It led me into a terrible adventure one time, however. When I was a stripling I fell, one night — I know not how — into the company of a number of rude and drunken roisterers, two of them at a time would hold me while the others tried to blow the halo out; their alcoholic breaths caught fire — in a moment we were all surrounded by a sheet of flame — the situation was truly desperate — but I summoned all my presence of mind and cried out — (To be continued in our next).

Yours sincerely,
Don Marquis.

Alfred A. Knopf today published “The Best of Archy and Mehitabel,” a new anthology of Don Marquis’ popular Archy and Mehitabel poems and sketches.

The new hardback is an abridged version of “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel,” first published in 1940 by Doubleday, Doran, Marquis’ longtime publisher. Doubleday and Knopf are both part of the Random House publishing group.

“The Best of Archy and Mehitabel”sells for $13.50 ($15.95 in Canada) and is part of the Pocket Poets series from Knopf’s Everyman’s Library imprint. The book has 256 pages, measures 4 1/8 by 6 1/4 inches, and includes George Herriman’s beloved cartoon illustrations and E.B. White’s introduction to the 1950 edition of “the lives and times of archy and mehitabel.”

“The best of Archy and Mehitabel” appears 100 years after Marquis’ first book was published. Marquis was a reporter and copy editor at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1911 when the Eagle published a history of the Brooklyn State Militia’s 14th Regiment on the 50th anniversary of its formation at the start of the Civil War. Marquis and a co-worker at the Eagle compiled the volume, which was privately printed and distributed at a reunion of regiment survivors.

Unlike other recent anthologies that contain new works — Michael Sims’ “The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel” in 2006 and Jeff Adams’ “archyology” series, published in 1996 and 1998 — “The Best of Archy and Mehitabel” is an abridgment of the 1950 edition of “the lives and times,” which itself was an abridgment of the three Archy books published during Don Marquis’ lifetime: “archy and mehitabel” (1927), “archys life of mehitabel” (1933) and “archy does his part” (1935).

The new book includes 65 sketches and poems, a third less than “the lives and times.” But even if this new book doesn’t contain every single gem from the original “archy and mehitabel,” fans will be grateful that Don’s publisher finally saw fit to set these classic poems and sketches in new type for the first time in 51 years. It gets painful to pick up a recent, reprinted paperback copy of “archy and mehitabel” and try to read through type that had degraded into inky smudges in the decades since it was last typeset in 1960.

Also notable: This new edition marks the first hardback edition of Archy material from Don’s publisher in more than 30 years.

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