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educational business, but they were weak in the high school and public school departments and they figured that Blaisdell would round out their picture. What luck! On the Blaisdell figures, there was a time when I would have given him away for nothing, just to get the headache off of my shoulders.

You see, it didn't bother me so much that we were losing money on it; but the future looked so ominous. We didn't know when we would turn the corner, and the budgets that we got for the next five years indicated that Blaisdell was just about going to eat up all of the profits that we were making in the other departments.

And yet you never thought of selling Singer?

No. We know that Singer is going to be very important. Basically, they've got some books still that are fine. We've fixed up the science series. The Suppes‘books have now been made part of the Singer system. We're coming along. Singer is going to be fine.

This brings up another question. You have always run Random House and you were interested in all of these things, but did you have anyone that was specially supposed to be in charge of this Singer and report to you? How did this--in that corporation flow chart or something--come about? Maybe we're jumping ahead because we haven't gotten into the RCA deal, but even before that...