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When you say “we” do you mean Random House?

He meant, would we form some group.

Oh, he was thinking of a group?

Of a group. He knew that no one firm could buy Grosset and Dunlap then. We hadn't gotten into high finance then in those days, Marshall Field was another story. He could afford it, sure; but no one publisher could.

I was interested immediately because I thought, “ S. and S. already own the pocketbook thing. Now if they buy Grosset...” Grosset had a corner on the hardbound reprint market. They were the books that sold largely in the drugstores. In those days 79$ and $1.29 were the reprint prices.

Wasn't this in some sort of a competition with your own Modern Library?

Not really. Grosset reprinted more popular books, more of the trashier stuff, than we did; and theirs was a full-sized book. The Modern Library edition was a little different. For a Hemingway reprint, for instance, they could bring out their edition at $1.29, in a replica of the original book. We would do it in a more compact Modern Library which was 95$, and we didn't compete with each other. But the paperbacks were beginning to cut into Modern Library.