Letter from a small-press publisher to a young collaborator, on the reception of a hoax the two of them had placed in print
- Origin
- A named personal papers collection, county public library, West Virginia
- Dated
- late 1960s; the collection's finding aid gives the folder and range
- Extent
- 1 pages
- Status
- accepted
- Redactions
- None.
Chain of custody
Read by our correspondent in the library's reading room across two days in April 2026, from boxes 12 to 16. No appointment, no letter of introduction, no fee — a free reader's card and a slip at the desk. The finding aid is online and names the folder. The collaborator himself described this episode in print, under his own name, in 1998; this newspaper did not approach him and did not need to.
Held by: Original remains with the library; They Buried holds a photograph and the call slip
Excerpt
Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.
Transcribed by the data desk. Line breaks follow the original. Bracketed matter is ours.
Editor's note
One sentence, and the only document in this newspaper's vault that is filed for its tone rather than its content. It is a man telling a colleague a joke had landed. The document desk accepts it as authentic correspondence from the collection it sits in, and notes that a single sentence about one hoax is not evidence about every other page in sixteen boxes. We have said so in the story.
Cited in
- The Ship Was Being Demagnetised. The Three Annotators Were Probably One Man.Culture · Aug 19
- He Made Them Up, Made Money, And Kept The Letters.Off-World · Aug 10