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thing out so that everybody profits, that's the ideal business.

Well, in this case it led to all kinds of things, because when Robert Haas retired from the Book of the Month Club after an interval, which we'll go into later, he became a partner of Random House; and the Schermans became close, close personal friends of ours. My wife Phyllis and I were with the Schermans playing bridge one afternoon we won't forget when somebody called up and said, “Pearl Harbor has been bombed.” We were sitting at the Scherman house playing bridge fighting over a hand. We felt so sheepish when we found that while we had been squabbling over a hand of bridge Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

When you saw how well the Book of the Month Club was doing, did you ever think, “Well, we'd better get in and join the bandwagon?”

No.

I wondered if any of your gambling instincts were aroused.

I'll add a story that played a part in my life. When I went on that first trip to England one of the principal things I did was to go to the English shops that had specialized in Nonesuch books and try to buy up any stock they might have had on hand because of the huge demand for these old Nonesuch books in America. And I did buy about $5000 worth of books that I found in bookshops there.