Grumbles From the Grave

June 4, 1969: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

What would be your opinion if I simply stopped answering mail from strangers?

I ask because the fan mail situation has gotten out of hand. In the past five years the volume has tripled, or more. Unless I keep it answered each day, the accumulation gets out of hand and it takes me forever to catch up. Yet I ca

This may seem trivial; it is not-unsolicited letters from strangers, fan mail plus endless requests for me to go here, speak there, donate mss., advise a begi

Form letters won't serve; there is simply too much variety in the incoming mail-I must either draft or dictate each answer. Either Gi

So it is either do it myself-or quit answering mail from strangers.

I have been thinking about the following expedient: A form printed on a U.S. postal card reading something like this -- "Thank you for your letter, which Mr. Heinlein has read and appreciated. We have no secretary and the volume of mail makes it impossible for me to answer each letter as it deserves. If your letter requires an answer other than this acknowledgment, please send a stamped and self-addressed envelope and refer to file number...In the meantime your letter will be held for thirty days in the pending file.

' 'We regret having to use this expedient, but the alternative is for Mr. Heinlein to give up writing stories in favor of answering letters.

"Sincerely,

"Virginia Heinlein

"(Mrs. Robert A. Heinlein)."

The above, with the surplus words sweated out of it and printed in smaller type, would go on a postcard-and each letter could be acknowledged each day simply by cutting the address off the letter and scotch-taping it to a card. Plus using one of those automatic serial-number stampers.

But it strikes me as an almost certain way to lose friends and antagonize people. Despite the fact that well over half the letters contain the phrase " -- while I know you are a very busy man -- " the truth is that each writer-reader is so important in his own eyes that he feels sure that his letter is so different, so interesting, so important, that I will happily stop whatever I am doing and answer his letter in full. When he gets one of these printed forms, his reaction will be: "Why, that snotty son of a bitch!"

So what do you think I should do? Quit answering at all? Use this printed acknowledgment? Keep on trying to answer them all? Or some other course I haven't thought of?

June 13, 1969: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Thank you for your long and thoughtful comments about fan mail. I am glad to have your confirmation that the printed postcard method is a bad idea; I will not use it. But I am much afraid that there is no solution to the problem short of not answering it at all.

In the first place I am not "too conscientious" about it as I do not spend a couple of pages in answering silly questions; Gi

I used to write careful answers to intelligent letters-but we gave that up over five years back; we had to.

Let's assume I could get a college student to answer letters satisfactorily at a dollar a letter (I can't, but let's stipulate it for the moment). That would still cost me a couple of thousand dollars a year-which I think is too much to pay for the questionable privilege of unsolicited mail from strangers. Most of my fan mail does not go through your office; the bulk of it is forwarded from publishers directly or has been addressed to Colorado Springs and forwarded from there (as every public library in die country has that C.S. address). Plus quite a chunk that is addressed to Santa Cruz. It adds up-it usually takes about a half hour each day just to read the fan mail. I can answer it usually, faster than I can read it, if a postcard will suffice. But Gi

But I do have to read it. Several times, when Gi

As near as I can find out from inquiries made to other colleagues, I get far more mail than any of my colleagues-for none of the others seems to find fan mail any problem. (I recall a plaint published by James Blish asking readers to please write to him-he needed feedback!)

This morning at breakfast we were reading the mail, which included your nice letter-and Gi

...Surely, I could load all the answering onto Gi

November 20, 1970: Virginia Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

Yes, sir. We will be careful with graduate students. We answer all letters except those which go into the "screwball" file, the ones from people who are more or less obviously crazy.