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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

Q:

Were you stuck with anything?

Cerf:

A couple of books that were coming in from the Nonesuch proved suddenly difficult to place. Instead of getting orders for ten times our allotment, we were lucky to clean out the books we got. There still remained some solvent collectors, but the whole fever had abated. A first edition copy of The Forsyte Saga, which had, I think, sold for $200 just before the crash, the next month at an auction went for $20. It went down 90 per cent just like the stock market. Everybody was busted, particularly the people who had been throwing money around this way. Several of them jumped.

Q:

What was the first book you published with the Random House imprint?

Cerf:

It was a prize Rockwell Kent production. We now had a name--Random House--and we had a trademark. I said, “Rockwell, the first book we do you've got to do.” And Rockwell said, “I've always wanted to illustrate Candide.” Candide was one of the most popular titles in our Modern Library, with no royalty to pay poor old Voltaire; he was in the public domain --the kind of author it's easy to deal with--dead for centuries. So we commissioned Rockwell Kent to do an illustrated Candide and Elmer Adler to print the book at Pynson Printers. As I recall, we did 1500 copies at $15 a copy, signed by Rockwell Kent. And the day the book came out it





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