Last Person to Marry a Duck Lived 300 Years Ago : Pointed Essays by Harlan Ellison

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Fewer than 250 copies were printed!

First came The Glass Teat, then Harlan Ellison’s Hornbook, then An Edge in My Voice, and, finally, Harlan Ellison’s Watching—but now, Harlan Ellison presents not one, not two, not three, but four whole columns* in one book! But wait, there’s more! Not only does this book contain four complete columns (Ask Uncle Harlan, The Streets, The Pitch, and I Had a Thought Today…), it also features more than a dozen one-off essays covering everything from the Heaven’s Gate suicides to the fallout from the 9/11 attacks, from chaos theory to Lovecraftian horror, and even essays on Harlan’s pals Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon. Oh, and did we mention that two pieces have never before been published?

* In the interest of full disclosure, we should probably note that none of the columns in question lasted more than four installments, but that’s hardly our fault; one of them outlasted its original venue of publication, so that’s something, right?

Edited by Jason Davis.

Cover by Steven Barber.

Contents:

• Infamy, Infamy, They’ve All Got It In Fa Me
• Ask Uncle Harlan (column)
  • 1991 Introduction to Installment 1
  • Installment 1: 5 August 1989
  • 1991 Introduction to Installment 2
  • Installment 2: 27 September 1989
  • 1991 Introduction to Installment 3
  • Installment 3: 19 December 1989
  • Installment 4: 28 June 1990
• An Accomplice of Liars and Forgers
• Strangers in a Strange Land
• Struggling for Interior Logic
• The Brides of Sheckenstein
• I, Felon
• Clark Ashton Smith: Out of Space and Time
• Tolerable Terror or, To Read Him Is to Fear Him
• The Streets (column)
  • The Road You Walk Is Thorny, My Son
  • Installment 1: 19 July 1990
  • Installment 2: 25 September 1990
  • Installment 3: 23 July 1991
• T’anks but No Tokes
• Abiding with Sturgeon: Mistral in the Bijou
• An Untitled, yet Antagonistic, Essay of Approximately 2700 Contumelious but Logical Words*
• Arthur ’n’ Me
• The Pitch (column)
  • Installment 1: It Goes in Neat, but It Comes Out…
  • Installment 2: …but It Comes Out Spinning, Like a Flying Saucer
• The Queen of Guilty Pleasures
• An Open Letter to Outré and Its Editors: J’accuse
• He Speaks, and the Angels Sing
• But I Digress… (Guest Column)
• The Misty Forward*
• Ellison’s Folly or, Horrors of the House of Glass
• The Soul of Solomon: What Is, Is; Sometimes, Perhaps, What Ain’t, Shouldn’t Be
• I Had a Thought Today… (column)
  • Installment 1: 14 November 2013
  • Installment 2: 18 March 2009
  • Installment 3: 2 May 2009/12 March 2012
  • Substitute Installment: 29 March 2009
• The Captain of Fate
• Terrorists

* Previously unpublished.

From 2009 until 2020, I was Harlan Ellison’s editor, producing 29 new collections of his work as well as expanded reissues of his catalog titles. While working on these titles, I amassed a large collection of pre-release proofs—books printed to check the layout, proofread, or otherwise test the product before mass production—promotional copies, and finished product. In an effort to clear space and fund my next publishing project, I am now offering the last of these books for sale.