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| Actor Gale McNeeley (below) and archy & mehitabel,illustrated by George Herriman (above) |
The Book Arts & Special Collections Center invites you to the Annual Holiday Lecture which will showcase actor and singer Gale McNeeley. His comic performance will bring to life Don Marquis’s characters archy and mehitabel in celebration of the 100th anniversary of their first appearance in print.
In case you are wondering just who or what archy and mehitabel are, let us explain. For the uninitiated, and those recently born: archy is a poetry-writing cockroach and mehitabel is Cleopatra, reborn as a cat. They were created in 1916 by the great newspaperman Don Marquis. The drawings of these characters, familiar to many, are by the brilliant cartoonist George Herriman, creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip. Gale McNeeley loves these characters and brings them to life anytime he has the chance and his timeless one-man show is a fitting tribute to the books. You’ll find over sixty volumes of Marquis’s writings, as well as books of Herriman's comic art, in the library’s Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor (SCOWAH), which was founded in 1947.
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| Cover art for The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, 1940 |
The Book Arts & Special Collections Center has been celebrating the holiday season with an Annual Holiday Lecture since 1995. The lectures have highlighted a fascinating array of local experts in the book and lettering arts including Jonathan Aaron, Sandro Berra, Alisa Golden, Alastair Johnston, James Keenan, Peter Koch, David Mostardi, Carl Rohrs, Rob Saunders, Patricia Wakida, Kathy Walkup, and Karen Zukor. Last year we hosted Dan Cohen’s talk about the Digital Public Library of America.
This year, we’ve chosen to celebrate both the library’s SCOWAH collection and the 100th anniversary of archy and mehitabel’s debut appearance in the New York Evening Sun. Please join us.
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| Gale McNeeley on stage |
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
6 p.m.
Koret Auditorium, Main Library, Lower Level
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin Street
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