Phronk's Scrapbook

Keeler typically padded the length of his novels with the following device: his protagonist would find a magazine or book, would open it randomly and discover a story. At this point, Keeler’s novel would stop dead in its tracks and he would insert the complete verbatim text of one of his wife’s short stories, this being the story his novel’s protagonist was reading. At the end of the story, the novel would continue where it left off, several pages nearer to its contractual minimum word count. These stories-within-the-novel typically contained only a few scraps of information that were relevant to the novel in which they appeared.

—Harry Stephen Keeler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia