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was a great deal of phoniness in him but he had flair. He had a knack for picking people. He picked people for his office, and he picked authors who were going places by some kind of intuition. As I said, he rarely read a book, but he was smart enough so that when you could tell him the outline of a book, he could con most authors into thinking he had sat up all night with the book--after just a 15-minute briefing from one of his editors.

I remember once in one of the sessions we had you said something about his having this idea. You told his wife after the fact. You said that was sort of his idea--the good man and the bastard.

With Horace being the bastard.

I was just wondering--did he constantly do this?

No, this was very unusual. He didn't get many ideas at all. First of all, a lot of the authors were wise to him, but they liked him, and he was quite unusual in his day. Most publishers were stodgy old poops who had no imagination at all. They had inherited the business or they had built it up the way a banker would build up a business in a small town. They had no imagination. Their advertisements were dusty. The books themselves were ugly. There was no attempt made to dress them up. And then along came these young fellows like