“If you work at Island Books day after day, surrounded by the weight and mass of fifty idle, old, black typewriters, it may occur to you that they have personalities, stories, and lives of their own. It may occur to you that some mysterious chatter might happen amongst them at night in the store when no one’s about. This sort of unattended consequence must have been on the mind of Don Marquis, a newspaper columnist for The Evening Sun, when he ‘collected’ a book of poems called Archy and Mehitabel in 1916. Archy, the office cockroach, who in a previous life was a free verse poet, writes by throwing himself headfirst onto each key at night. He can’t operate the shift key to make capital letters, but he manages to capture after-hours life with Mehitabel the cat (in her ninth life) and other press room visitors. Archy’s a philosopher who lives on stale paste and sees “things from the underside now.” The book is still in print and I recommend it often to anyone who will listen.” —Roger Page, Island Books, Mercer Island.
Introduce the free verse philosopher cockroach into your home! Buy The Best of Archy and Mehitabel from Island Books.
Roger, I want to organize an reading.