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It does to some extent.

Has Random House ever gone into some of these polls or made, so called, the intellectual approach to see if a certain jacket sells? I mean how do you really know...?

I have very little respect for those polls. This is one of those excesses indulged in by big business. A “big business” can find more ways to waste millions of dollars! They'll have expensive showrooms on Park Avenue, and nobody ever goes into them. Some of them are right around the corner from our office on Park Avenue, and they must cost the companies involved a million dollars a year. What do they get out of it? They've got their showrooms on Park Avenue. So what? They could just as well have them over on Eleventh Avenue. You seldom see anybody in these places. Some big “executive” is in charge, getting a fat salary so he can sit at a desk and do nothing until lunch time when he can soak up martinis. But these polls...

RCA hasn't, as a big corporation, suggested...

Oh, they'll send around a group once in a while with some nebulous assignment finding out “foreign potentials” for example. A couple of RCA appointees popped up one day for that purpose. It soon became apparent that they didn't know anything about the publishing business at all. Still