Next month, Delacorte Press is publishing the collection Kurt Vonnegut: Letters. Now, normally these sort of things are of interest only to the extremely engaged fan—those completists who just have to own every scrap of material written by a particular author. The “lost” letters of Edith Wharton, say.

However, the Delacorte edition promises to be something different. Among the items collected within its pages is this selection from a January 1947 “contract” drawn up by Vonnegut and his pregnant wife, Jane (the two had been married for sixteen months):

i. In the event that my wife makes a request of me, and that request cannot be regarded as other than reasonable and wholly within the province of a man’s work (when his wife is pregnant, that is), I will comply with said request within three days after my wife has presented it. It is understood that my wife will make no reference to the subject, other than saying thank you, of course, within these three days; if, however, I fail to comply with said request after a more substantial length of time has elapsed, my wife shall be completely justified in nagging, heckling, or otherwise disturbing me until I am driven to do that which I should have done;

Eminently reasonable, but just slightly cracked in execution. In other words, exactly what you would expect from the author of Cat’s Cradle—the sanest book on the insanity of modern life that you can find. Funniest, too.