Other books by Price included
What Not to Name the Baby and
In One Head and Out the Other (Ballantine, 1954), which popularized the catch phrase "I had one grunch, but the eggplant over there." The nonsense non sequitur was immediately adopted by science fiction fandom, appearing occasionally in science fiction fanzine, as noted in
Fancyclopedia II (1959):
- In Price's In One Head and Out the Other, the bible of Avoidism, his character Clayton Slope "had a clever trick of saying any conceivable sentence so that it sounded like "I had one grunch but the eggplant over there." Fans find the expression useful, too... Avoidism: Not originally fannish at all, but a philosophy devised in a rather stomach-turning book, In One Head and Out the Other, this doctrine became confused/associated with the Gandhi-following folk of Eric Frank Russell's "And Then There Were None". It inspired an APA, MYOB and an Avoidist Movement which avoided amounting to anything. Tenets are those implied by the root word. Lee Hoffman explains that three types of avoidism are distinguished: (1) pure, (2) applied, and 3) active, or Activist. In pure avoiding, one avoids everything except eating, breathing and metabolizing. In applied avoiding, one avoids as many things as possible. (Bus drivers are good at this sort of thing, like avoiding people waiting at bus stops.) Active avoidism isn't true avoidism and is practiced to Publicize the Cause, or as an exercise in Avoiding. Under active avoidism there is the subgroup Counteravoiding; to counteravoid vegetarianism, for instance, one eats meat. Leeh concluded: "A last word on Avoidism: I had one grunch but the eggplant over there."
I'm for Me First (Ballantine, 1954) is a humor book about Herman Clabbercutt's plan to launch a revolutionary political party known as the "I'm for Me First" Party. Price also wrote
J.G., the Upright Ape (1960), which publisher Lyle Stuart claimed was one of his worst-selling books. It was described by Robert Michael Pyle in
Orion Afield (Autumn 1998):
- By chance, when I was buying Daniel Quinn’s book (Ishmael) at Powell’s Books in Portland, I first spotted Roger Price’s J.G., The Upright Ape. This 1960 novel also employs the device of the gorilla as the protagonist. J.G. is a member of a fictional high-elevation subspecies called the silver gorillas. His search for his abducted mate, Lotus, in America becomes a vehicle for sharp, witty satire of contemporary culture. "For the first time in his life, J.G. was unhappy. It required great concentration on his part, because it isn’t easy to be unhappy when you have such a tiny brain." Neither author can challenge Schaller’s and Fossey’s gorilla scholarship, but their fictions point to a conclusion that the researchers might recognize: gorillas...gentle, cooperative, environmentally benign...are in some ways better than humans.
During the 1960s, Price opened the first New York art gallery devoted only to cartoons, and in 1965-66 he edited his short-lived humor publication,
Grump, which featured such contributors as Isaac Asimov, Christopher Cerf, Derek Robinson, Susan Sands, Jean Shepherd and cartoonist Don Silverstein.
One of Price's friends was the humor columnist Burt Prelutsky ("The Squeaky Wheel"), who recalled Price's interest in women:
- I had a friend, Roger Price, who devoted much of his life to the study of women. As part of his research, he married four of them. One of them was a Japanese woman who spoke no English. So amicable were the four divorces that Roger never paid a single dollar in alimony. Although Roger, creator of Droodles and author of In One Head and Out the Other, had a reputation as a satirist and a curmudgeon, he was extremely fond of women, and never made a secret of the fact that he found them more interesting than men. And what's more, he would add, they smell better. One day, when Roger was getting up in years, he confessed to me: "When I was young, I kept women around for sex. Now, I have sex with women in order to keep them around."
At the time of his death in 1990, Price lived in Studio City, California.
In 2000, after Stern and Sloan launched another publishing company, Tallfellow Press, they acquired the rights to
Droodles and reissued it as
Droodles: The Classic Collection.