MARQUIS, DON — Archy Does His Part

Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran & Company, 1935. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. Illustrated by Don Marquis. B&W Illustrations; This book is in Very Good condition and is lacking the dust jacket. The spine ends and corners of the book covers have some bumping, rubbing and wear. There are two tears to the top spine ends of the book covers along with two little edge tears. The front cover pictorial pastedown is in clean, bright condition. The pictorial label on the spine has noticeable fading. The text pages are clean and bright. "Marquis\'s best-known creation was Archy, a fictional cockroach (developed as a character during 1916) who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and who supposedly left poems on Marquis\'s typewriter by jumping on the keys. Archy usually typed only lower-case letters, without punctuation, because he could not operate the shift key. His verses were a type of social satire, and were used by Marquis in his newspaper columns titled "archy and mehitabel"; mehitabel was an alley cat, occasional companion of archy and the subject of some of archy\'s verses. The archy and mehitabel pieces were illustrated by cartoonist George Herriman, better known to posterity as the author of the newspaper comic Krazy Kat. Other characters developed by Marquis included Pete the Pup, Clarence the ghost, and an egomaniacal toad named Warty Bliggins. " (from Wikipedia). Very Good .