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let him take it; and we've always done that ourselves. If you have an editor you trust, if he's behind a book and the advance isn't too staggering we don't even always read it any more than Horace did. He'd say, “Well, if you're that crazy about it, I trust you as an editor. Go ahead.” We do the same.

Would an editor go to the meeting and have to defend himself.

Sometimes, yes. Now, there were experiences. For instan. I did the catalogue. It was the kind of a place that any time you volunteered to do anything, you got it because most of them were busy drinking bootleg liquor. It was a very gay place. And if anybody wanted to work, there was plenty of work to do; and I wanted to do the catalogue. I had ideas about the catalogue. One of them was to get Ralph Barton, an artist who had become very famous in the New Yorker, to do a cover for the catalogue which would have little pictures of all our authors-- caricatures. Barton agreed to do the catalogue for me. I neglected, however, to ask him what he was going to charge us and I got a bill for $300 from him. Oh, God, did I get bawled out by Horace--rightly. $300 for a catalogue cover! But it was by Barton!

Horace was the kind of man who would get some young girl to sit on his lap while we were having one of our cocktail parties. He'd be sitting with his hand over her shoulder, with his hand inside her dress, on her breast, and with his other hand he'd be calling his wife and saying, “How are the children?" This was Liveright showing off.