Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
What is this incident?
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http://harlanellison.com/text/newsfaq.txt
DID HARLAN REALLY MAIL A DEAD GOPHER TO AN EDITOR?
Nope. It was the comptroller of a certain publishing house that bound a cigarette ad into one of Harlan's paperbacks, breaking a stipulation in Harlan's contract. Although better related in Harlan's essay "Driving in the Spikes", suffice to say that after trying nicely to get the book rights reverted back to him, as per his contract, and getting blown off, Harlan mailed 213 bricks postage due to the man (this was back when the US Postal Service would mail anything postage-free, making the recipient pay up), had a Luthuanian hit man friend of his have a talk with him, and then mailed the dead gopher, along with Ted Cogswell's recipe for braised gopher stew, fourth class mail, where it stank up the mailing room for quite a while.