One morning in 1916 newspaperman Don Marquis discovers a cockroach jumping about on the keys of his office typewriter, tapping out a poem, letter by letter. The cockroach is archy, a free verse poet in a previous life. From archy's poem he learns that the cat mehitabel was once Cleopatra. Thus begins a literary legend, the comic rantings of archy, whose poems use no capital letters because the cockroach could not work the shift key on his boss's typewriter. mehitabel is a racy, free-spirited alley cat (motto: toujours gai ). As she can't type, archy, sophisticated wit, scandalmonger and whimsical philosopher, becomes her reporter. archy entertained readers with his iconoclastic observations on pretensions, politics and the cosmos during Marquis' long career as a New York columnist. His books, which include archy and mehitabel and archy's life of mehitabel, have gone on to sell thousands of copies a year. But when Marquis died in 1937, his papers were simply packed into a trunk and left in a Brooklyn warehouse: among them were the long lost tales of archyology. The first volume, archyology, was published by Bloodaxe in 1996; the second, archyology ii, followed in 2000.