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Keep on with this story first.

All right, I'll finish it. Well, we had 500 copies. We had orders for about 5000! So we were in the position of cutting orders instead of soliciting them. If a book store like the Brick Row Book Shop in New Haven--these were the kind of stores that did wonderfully with these Press books-- ordered 100 copies, they got 10. Then the fighting would start. There was one store in New York called the Gotham Book Mart, which is still in existence--Mrs. Frances Steloff runs it-- and they did very well with these books, and they'd come around crying and sobbing. They'd taken about 50 orders themselves for this book, and we could allot them only five books. So being the agents meant as the books came in, we had 10 times as many orders as we could fill. It was not only very profitable, but it gave us great kudos, because the Nonesuch Press then was a mark of distinction--like the names Mark Cross or Abercrombie and Fitch.

How did you arrange the financial arrangements? Would they take a certain percentage of what you could get?

We got these books at a considerable discount--I've forgotten what it was; it was something like 65% off--and we sold them for a very small discount. It was not like regular bookselling. So although we had to pay a lot of freight and customs and things, there was quite a good margin. But profit was not what we were looking for; it was the distinction.