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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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publishing business of its own, a very considerable one. They said that this was possibly a similar case for governmental displeasure.

These big corporation lawyers are a closed fraternity, and the Macmillan lawyers put the wind up in the RCA legal department. RCA decided that maybe we should sell our share too. So when Harper's and Little Brown heard this...well, we had always voted together, we decided that maybe the time had come to sell our interest. We had a huge profit, not only with the dividends that we had been getting, but the stock was now at a place where it was worth about ten times what we had put into it--really, more than ten times.

As I've told you, a deal was almost consummated with Commercial Investment Trust; but along came these suits that the Government instituted against eighteen publishers; including Random House and Grosset, claiming that we fixed prices for schools and libraries.

Q:

Well, you did a little bit.

Cerf:

Well, it was a practice that every publisher indulged in. At issue were special editions made for the schools in highly different bindings than the trade editions, and we didn't want the jobbers to undercut us just to get that business away. So we all established a fixed price. By a strict interpretation of the law, this was incorrect; but the Government itself has admitted that we didn't attempt to





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