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fifty cents a copy. They ultimately went to $1.00 a copy as the costs went up. We were doing very well with them, but Curtis felt that they could do infinitely better with their wider distribution facilities. The series was getting beyond us. We saw that to really sell these books properly, they had to be sold the way that Golden Books and paperback books were. When Curtis added a royalty per copy to their original offer, we accepted.

At this point, of course, Curtis was in with Grosset and Dunlap?

Yes. Grosset and Curtis bought it jointly. So we still had a little finger in it.

You weren't sorry or you don't regret it?

Oh, my heavens, we made a fortune out of it.

We had formed a little separate company for Wonder Books-Donald and Bob Haas and myself and Lou Miller, our sales manager, who really dreamed up this series. When we sold out, we sold the series personally. What we got was capital gains. That was the biggest money any of us, up to this stage, had taken out of the publishing business. Everything else that we had made had gone back into Random House. This was the beginning of the big money for us!