I can't remember the name of the story, and couldn't find anything on Google searches either.
The story is about a science fiction writer whose story gets rejected by the publisher because it's word-by-word identical to another story published years ago. The writer then writes another story only to find out that the same author also published this story around the same time as the other one.
Our writer then writes a story about a man who uses a time machine to read other people's work in the future and then publishes it in his time. Only to find out that this story was also published by the same guy years ago.
The story I'm trying to find out was in the form of letter correspondence between the writer and the publisher.
So, does anyone know its title?
Answer
Looks like Who's Cribbing by Jack Lewis. From this Usenet thread:
There's a story, which I really wish I could remember the details of, which consists of a series of letters between the author and various SF magazines. All the letters from the magazines are along the lines of "Thank you for your contribution, but we already published exactly this story 20 years ago". The author, in his various letters to the magazines, gets more and more defensive, pleading with the editors not tell him that some guy his never heard of has already written the story. Eventually, he bundles all these letters together and sends them to one last magazine with a cover note saying that he's done some research into this guy he's supposedly plagiarising, and thinks it was the other way around - Mr X was apparently a bit of a backyard tinkerer, and suppose he invented some machine for seeing into the future...? "Thank you for your contribution. It's an intriguing premise, and we certainly would have accepted it for publication, had [Mr X] not submitted exactly this story 20 years ago..."
Your description reminded me of something I'd read, but I haven't read Who's Cribbing, so I must have misremembered some other plagiarism-related story.
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