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Yes. Pantheon is still separate.

We got the ideal man to run it. He is André Schiffrin, also the son of a famous professor. André has important connections abroad. Pantheon is being nursed by us to do fine books. We're not asking them to produce best-sellers, although every once in a while they come across a surprise big winner. It's doing very well.

To show you what a lucky bastard I am... it looked for some time as though we paid too high a price for Pantheon. But then Dr. Zhivago was made by MGM into what is one of the three or four most successful motion pictures in history. Dr. Zhivago is almost as big as Quo Vadis and Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music. The sale of the Modern Library Giant edition of Dr. Zhivago and the paperback edition of Dr. Zhivago has now earned us in royalties over half of what we paid for the entire business. This is just sheer luck!

The immediate question that comes to my mind was whether there was any conflict with Pantheon and Knopf because in some ways they publish the same type of books.

We felt that Alfred and Blanche were losing contact with publishers abroad. For awhile Knopf had them all. They had Thomas Mann and Camus and Sartre, but Blanche was losing her health. She was a gallant woman. She fought with all of the strength that she had. She was an amazing woman... very gallant, very annoying.