Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, states that Dahl took the plot of "The Bookseller" from "Clerical Error" (also published as "Foot In It"), a 1935 short story by James Gould Cozzens. Some readers wrote to Playboy drawing attention to the apparent plagiarism, but these letters were not published.[1] Cozzens's original story had been adapted for television in a 1983 episode of Tales of the Unexpected,[2] a series with which Dahl was closely associated.