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Bennett CerfBennett Cerf
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Session:         Page of 1029

from his secretary, Miss Patch, saying that Mr. Shaw never allowed any of his plays to go into an anthology. She was very sorry.

Well, since I was going over to England, I persuaded Lawrence Langner, the head of the Theater Guild, to give me a letter of introduction to Shaw. I called up the day I got to London, and Shaw answered the phone personally, to my amazement. “I know you want my play,” he said. “I won't give it to you-- but if you'd like to meet me, come and have tea.” He named a day for me to come to his apartment in Whitehall, which was right on the Thames between the Savoy and Westminster Abbey. It was a famour apartment house.

Also, at that time we had just bought the rights to publish in a trade edition something that had only been sold to doctors until then; the four-volume Havelock Ellis‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex. The rights belonged to Davis & Company. I went down to Philadelphia and talked them into letting us do a trade edition for the general public.

Q:

How did you get this idea? Had you seen the book?

Cerf:

Oh, Havelock Ellis was talked about then the way the hippies and yippies are talked about now. He represented a breakthrough, writing about sadism and people who had made dates to get whipped by strangers and other perversions...

Q:

But even though it hadn't been a trade book--





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