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It's sad. I think that you're going to see a big change in the next ten years in this.

It's changing right now. The book business in the last twenty years has changed beyond belief. Publishers used to lead a private, leisurely existence. Today publishing is big business, and a great deal of romance and glamour and fun has gone out of it. There's still plenty left, and maybe I'm just a man who's getting old who's upset!

You did Don't Drink the Water in 1956. Did you miss that? You haven't talked about that, or is there nothing that you have to add?

The only thing that I have to add is that, having done No Time for Sergeants, which was number one, we were looking for another service comedy book. A book of short stories came in, which I read on a plane going out to Cleveland. I called up from Cleveland and said, “This is hilarious stuff. Get this fellow signed up right away. I've got to talk to him as soon as I come back because I don't want him to do this as a book of short stories. I want him to make it into a novel.” The author was a fellow named Bill Brinkley, on the staff of Time-Life. He was a damned good writer. He immediately saw the validity of my argument that books of short stories don't sell as well as a novel. So taking these short stories, he strung them