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I didn't mean Faulkner. O'Hara I meant.

I don't think that O'Hara would have minded so much, but we have a lot of young fiery authors and most of our editors are very liberal fellows and there might have been hell to pay. But we hadn't gotten around to facing that yet. The advantages were so obvious. The mail order business that we could have done together was so fantastic. But we soon discovered that the government wouldn't stand for the deal. Both our lawyers and Time-Life lawyers sounded out the Department of Justice. They said, “Absolutely nothing doing.” That's why I wonder if they are going to get away with Little, Brown; but it's much smaller than Random House and it hasn't got that huge juvenile business, which they thought conflicted with the Time-Life books. And indeed it did.

Do you think that there are going to be any disadvantages in this merger?

The trouble with Time-Life is that they know too much about the publishing business.

This is what I'm trying to get at.

Oh, sure. They are publishers. Even though it's magazines that they do, they've also done lots of books. The books are mostly table books. They are more for pure show