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We did this for months. It was lots of fun. When we'd get a big order from Macy's we'd dance around with glee. It ran the total way up.

One of our very first letters was from a man I'd never met but who was one of my heroes in publishing, Mr. Alfred A. Knopf, who said he would like to meet me. He had started the American Mercury then, edited by Nathan and Mencken. His Borzoi books were my dream of the way books should look. He had revolutionized the typography of books with stained tops, two-color title pages, etc. Everything that Knopf did was to me publishing at its best. So I went happily up to meet Mr. Knopf, whose office was then in the Heckscher Building on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, and was ushered into the great man's presence. Knopf shook hands with me in a rather condescending way. He said, “I've heard about you two boys, and I just want to find out if you're going to be as bad crooks as the man you bought the Modern Library from.”

He thereupon launched into a tirade about Horace Liveright, which came down to the fact that Liveright had put Green Mansions into the Modern Library because there was no copyright on it, but Alfred Knopf considered it his book because he had met the author, Hudson, and introduced his book in America. Furthermore, it was at this time the biggest selling book in the whole Modern Library. Green Mansions was a very popular book.

It still is today.