A propos this, philosopher Ian Rumfitt (Oxford) wrote to John Rapko and myself the following (which he kindly gave permission to share):
Your story about finding an unopened letter from Isaiah Berlin in one of Paul Grice's books reminded me of a tale told by a colleague of Grice's at St John's College Oxford in the 1960s.
UC Berkeley was keen to lure Grice from Oxford. In the manner of those days, they wrote a formal letter offering him a full professorship with a specified starting salary. Some weeks having elapsed without their having received a reply, they assumed that Grice had found the proffered salary insultingly low and wrote again, with a better proposal. Once more, they heard nothing, so they wrote a third time, offering him a *very* generous salary. This last letter happened to arrive shortly before Grice's six-monthly opening of his correspondence -- which is how HPG came to accept the third offer and move to California.
I don't know what the moral of the tale might be. Maybe: it doesn't always pay to open letters promptly.
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