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Do you remember what you paid for it?

Oh, several thousand dollars, but nothing to write home about.

I mean, you bought the back list in other words and the future possibilities.

Well, Proust was dead already. What we bought was his seven volume masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Immediately we republished it in a beautiful four-volume set, which we had specially designed. It was one of the typographical masterpieces of its year. It's a lovely set. Later we compressed Proust into two volumes, and it's been published that way ever since.

You never did it in Modern Library though.

We certainly did. It's all in Modern Library--the whole thing.

Was the original...when you did this original nice binding and everything, was that in the Modern Library?

Oh, no. That came some years later.

Today, Swann's Way still sells well in colleges, but the succeeding volumes have dropped off to a point where we