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Charles it wasn't our fault. It was what he insisted he wanted and he would take no more.

The next thing that happened with Bantam Books was that Crowell Collier began buying wads of Grosset stock on the open market. They weren't part of our combination at all. This was a Loeb, Rhodes and Company creation--a colossus that had bought Macmillan, Brentano's, The LaSalle Institute and Lord knows what else. We didn't like this, but we couldn't do anything about it. Suddenly we found out that they owned more stock in Grosset than Harper, Random House, or Little Brown owned. It was not as much as Book-of-theMonth, which owned twice as much as we did. When Scribner sold out, we all bought proportionately so that we kept our same balance. There was nothing that we could do about the Crowell Collier threat. We wondered what they were up to. They didn't demand places on the board or anything. We were waiting for their move. Then RCA bought Random House, and these big corporation lawyers got together. The Macmillan lawyers one day came up with the idea that the Government, if they knew that other publishers owned Grosset and Dunlap, would holler “restraint of trade” and otherwise raise hell. RCA, which does millions of dollars of Government work, is particularly sensitive about things like this. So RCA said that we had to sell our Grosset stock. Well, we didn't want to, but they own the company now.

We had always agreed that we would never work independently. So when Harper's lawyers heard about it, they