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It's all anti-trust if you look at it.

The government and the network heads themselves began screaming about these free cross plugs. The reason for the founding of Geis‘business began to dim. But, Bernie, by paying fancy royalties and making all kinds of special deals, snagged quite a few good books.

He's an idea man.

Yes. He's an idea man and also very good on publicity and also very clever at getting rights that most publishers don't get. Very often he'll pop up with twenty-five per cent of the movie rights or more than half of the reprint rights. He was able to make these deals because he was bamboozling people who were not used to writing books.

But when he came and suggested, “Would we be interested in distributing his books?" we responded because he then had on his list President Truman, Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. That's quite a trio, isn't it? He had Truman signed up for a history book, which has never been written. He did do a book by Truman but not the one that sounded like a million dollars in the bank: Truman's history of the United States intended for the juvenile market. So we made a deal with Geis that, I must say, we profited by enormously because it was just a straight distribution deal. We had no editorial responsibility for his publications. We just distributed them.