Jonathan shares:

About a week ago, I read this, in a book by Ira Wallach called Gutenberg's Folly, published in 1954:

"Some of that book," he said, "was written on the cylinder head of a ship ploughing through the Red Sea in the heat of an Arabian summer.[...] I'll never forget it," he said. "I proofread that cylinder head myself!"

Just a few days later, I read this, in a book by Frank Sullivan called The Life and Times of Martha Hepplethwaite, published in 1926:

Then I felt a strange impulse to write a poem. There was no paper handy. I acted upon the impulse of the moment and scribbled the verse upon the back of a taxicab I had been leaning against, waiting for traffic to pass. The taxi driver was very angry with me when he discovered what I had done, but when he read the poem he wept and said it was marvelous, and I must sell it to some magazine.

The poem was there on the taxicab, so we had to take the taxicab along, too, and we felt so foolish dragging that taxicab into magazine office after magazine office. Finally we sold the taxicab and the poem for $14, and you cannot know how delighted the taxicab chauffeur and I were with that first money earned from my poetry.