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There was a fellow down there named Chester Weil, who was in charge of these features. You see, they started out as newspaper series. Then Weil would put them together and offer them as a book. That was the genesis of Guadalcanal Diary.

A clever man, though. I mean, he helped his authors tremendously.

Yes.

So that then he would send them on to you or...

He would send them on. The only trouble was that he didn't know much about book publishers. At the start, he didn't have the faintest idea how much these books might make. He could have gotten much better contracts. Then the competition heated up and the advances began zooming. A lot of the later books got advances that were never earned. The passion for war books evaporated overnight.

Of course, I've always said that there are two kinds of agents in the world. One is the honest agent who does the best that he can for his author but still realizes that a contract, to be any good, has to allow both sides to do well. Then there are the rapacious agents, mostly ones who never even read the books, but just barge in to get as much as they can. They very often will get such a big advance that the publisher can't