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Do you remember how much you paid him--what you bought him out for?

I haven't the vaguest idea--not much. Random House was still small then.

Do you remember the second title?

Well, we began looking. There was a printer out in California who was becoming famous named Edwin Grabhorn. I had bought for myself a few of his beautiful, beautiful books done on hand-made paper in San Francisco and I went out there to try to get Mr. Grabhorn to do a book for Random House. We settled on a book, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, to sell, if you please, for $100 a copy. When it was announced that Random House was doing a Grabhorn Press edition of the Walt Whitman at $100 a copy, we immediately received five times as many orders as the whole edition. But before the book came out, just about the time that Mr. Grabhorn, who usually got a book out about a year later than he was supposed to (he was another one of these temperamental geniuses like Elmer Adler-- money and time meant nothing to Grabhorn), got the book finished, the crash was on us. Disasterville! A lot of the people who had ordered the book were broke, and several who had already paid the $100 pleaded with us to give the money back. They said, “We can't afford $100 for a book. We need it for food for our baby.” Those were fantastic days. People who