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to shoot off my mouth occasionally and make statements that I don't quite mean or can't quite prove. Ayn, again and again, would nail me to the corner of the wall. We liked each other. That's the answer. She asked me an infinite number of questions. Later on, after she had come to Random House, she showed me that she had kept a chart. She had visited about fifteen publishers, and she rated them when she got home on all the different things that they had said. I didn't realize that I was being rated this way, but I came out very high because I was absolutely honest with her. I said, “Your political philosophy I find abhorrent.” Nobody else had dared tell her this. I said, “If we publish you, Miss Rand, nobody is going to try to censor you. You write anything that you darn please in fiction, at least, and we'll publish it, whether or not we approve.”

She was just finishing Atlas Shrugged. When Atlas Shrugged came out, it had an enormous advance sale. It was her first novel since The Fountainhead. We printed 100,000 copies because there was tremendous interest. Then the reviews came out. Well, the critics absolutely murdered her as they always did, and the sale was badly crimped. We thought that we were going to be hooked. The fact of the matter is that the book is now in about its twelfth edition. It goes on and on and on, even after the paperback has come out.

Incidentally, this paperback made history because for the first time its publisher (Signet) dared to price a