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I would have fallen off the chair. But NAL paid $500,000.

Had they read the book?

I don't know if they had read it or not. But of course...

They lost...

A fortune.

But that was the beginning of a wild period. In three weeks I sold three books to reprint for $1,700,000-- the Winsor book for $500,000, John O'Hara's The Lockwood Concern for another $500,000, and James Michener's The Source, for a record $700,000! So in three weeks, Random House sold three books for $1,700,000 guarantee. There may never be another period like that in publishing history.

Well, we started this session on the wartime radio show “Books are Bullets” but we seem to have wandered! This was the beginning for you of radio and later, TV. Did you feel that you learned something in the beginning from this radio program that could help fashion a whole new career for you?

Well, it was as a result of the bond tour that somebody who had heard me at one of the big rallies suggested a wartime program on the radio, which I named “Books are Bullets.”