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many other publishers have since copied, and which is now an enormous part of our business. It's one of the things that attracted RCA.
Would you like to explain that a little bit for someone that might not know too much about publishing?
These are editions specially bound for rugged school and library use. We call them Gibraltar editions. Every publisher has his own name for them. They're for sale just for schools and libraries. Now, a lot of us have gotten into trouble with the government about these editions, because we in effect, price-fix them. We wouldn't allow the jobbers to sell them at any less than we did. This turned out to be a technical violation of the fair trade laws. Eighteen publishers have just signed a consent decree--we were one of them--promising that we wouldn't do this anymore.
But this was Louis Miller's idea.
The whole thing was his idea, and by the time he left we had over 50 men in a special department just selling books to schools and libraries. A lot of the money came from the United States government, you know. When the U.S. grants came through, we were the ones that were ready for it before anybody else. We would have our men go into libraries where sometimes the whole state had gotten about $20,000 to spend. Our man would
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