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the books up on it and then wheel this whole display from one side of the store to the other. And a lot of damn fools who should have bought ten copies bought a hundred to get this thing that cost about $3. That was the gimmick. And of course when we got there, they were wheeling the whole piles back and forth. Nobody was buying The Story of the Bible.

So that was my first trip.

How long did Dick Simon stay with you?

He left right after this trip. And then suddenly here I was, the New York and East Coast representative of Boni and Liveright and meeting the world through Beatrice Kaufman and the Swopes!

Did you do any of the reading of the unsolicited manuscripts?

Yes, then I started reading scripts, too, I was not an editor, but Beatrice was. Horace soon discovered that I did have a sense of books, and I began reading books seriously while selling them, too. Remember, I was a Vice-President! Ho, ho!

A couple of amusing things happened at this time, and I learned how reader's reports can disappear. One day shortly after I was there, a book came out called These Charming People by Michael Arlen. Michael Arlen was an Armenian, and this book came out about butterflies of the society world. It was a big