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We hired some outside people to do the judging. Finally the award was made to a young girl who lived in a three-room apartment in Harlem! Of course her parents sold the horse for her for a very good price, but wouldn't you know that it would be won by some little city tenement kid, not some youngster who had a place in which to ride it!

Walter Farley, I mean he's considered...Well, of course, my generation grew up on the Black Stallion books. Were all of these under his own initiative or, to your knowledge, did your editors ever help him?

No. Louise Bonino was his editor and was very helpful, but Walter Farley wrote his own books. Nobody in our place really knew anything about horses. This was his baby!

You still publish him.

Indeed we do. The series is not what it used to be. The books don't sell the way they used to. The first ones still are the most popular. He overplayed it, I guess, There are now about twenty books, and you know how these series are. They go well for awhile and then they taper off when something new comes along.

Besides Walter Farley, we have the Babar the Elephant books, the Landmark series, the All-Abouts, and Dr. Seuss. That's some juvenile division!