A real delight. Very funny poems with their profound side as well. I especially love the tough, independent Mehitabel.

Delightful. Culturally interesting. 4.5

This book is weird as shit. Definitely grab it if you see a copy. Its vers libre poetry (free verse), so the best way to read it is probably to pick and choose/skim to find the sections you like. All of the poetry is written by Archy the Cockroach, who lives in a newspaper office. He has many opinions about the meaning of life and the importance of unions, and frankly, he makes some good points.

Odd but fun, worth seeking out.

this is just a truly bizarre book on - sort of - reincarnation and ways of killing time and life in general and its just weird and wonderful
because its written by a cockroach on a typewriter there are no characters that require you to hit two keys at once, theres no uppercase and not much punctuation much
theres lots of very profound sad and funny stuff - sometimes all at once

ps the title of the book is lowercase archy and mehitabel not as it shows above

This is an old book but so many of the messages still apply to today. The author uses animals to bring up things humans might get in trouble for saying which is brilliant in my opinion. I never wanted it to end. Instant favorite.

Something unlike anything I would usually read. It's written by Archy, a cockroach who writes by jumping on a typewriter from key to key. There are no capital letters (presumably because a cockroach isn't big enough to press the shift key as well as the letter) and also no punctuation. This book is refreshing and charming.

Some extracts I particularly enjoyed:

there is always
something to be thankful
for you would not
think that a cockroach
had much ground
for optimism
but as the fishing season
opens up i grow
more and more
cheerful at the thought
that nobody ever got
the notion of using
cockroaches for bait


if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there

i don't know, this just might be my all time favorite book. how can you resist the chronicles of a cock-roach who types fervently and a house-cat who thinks she is cleopatra re-incarnated???

I read this when I was a kid, because it was a favorite of my mother’s. It’s funny, sometimes meandering, sometimes profound.

The premise is that it was written by a cockroach named archy. The author left a blank sheet in the typewriter every night, and archy took this opportunity to jump onto it and laboriously bang away about his life and thoughts. Archy couldn’t manage capital letters or punctuation marks, so he has a distinct and very modern style.

Archy tells us that he wasn’t always a cockroach, and that his current shape is punishment for having been a free verse poet. He also transcribes the songs and sayings of mehitabel, the cat, who is a reincarnation of Cleopatra. Mehitabel is an alleycat with great pretensions, and she says, “To hell with anything unrefined has always been my motto.”

In one chapter, archy describes the balance of power between species. He describes how the angleworm speaks, after it is eaten by a robin, about how it has lost its individuality and become part of the bird. The bird, meanwhile, sings its own song of well-being until it’s eaten by the cat. Archy concludes “how beautiful is the universe when something digestible meets with an eager digestion, when atom rushes to the arms of waiting atom and they dance together skimming with fairy feet along a tide of gastric juices.” (I added the comma; there are no commas in this book.)

The signal to noise ratio isn't high in this. Nostalgia made me want to like it more than I did. Archy is a charming character and imagining life as a cockroach with a human mind is charming. The best bits, reflections on humanity's hypocrisy, are wonderful. The rest? Not so interesting.