The author as drunken lout is hardly groundbreaking, but it’s rare to unearth the sort of apology Edgar Allen Poe offered his publishers J. and H.G. Langley for his mint julep-fuelled behaviour in 1842:

Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behavior while in N-York? You must have conceived a queer idea of me “ but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.

Naturally the apology was enclosed in a pitch “ for an article on gardening.